It was one bombshell too many. Sylvia Avery’s head lolled first to the side and then down as though her neck had turned to rubber. Behind her, I saw Beehive pick up the phone. She kept her eye on me and started talking to someone. The wooden smile was gone.

“Natalie was such a happy girl.” Her head was still down, her chin on her chest. “You can’t imagine. Or maybe you can. You loved her. You got to see the real her, but that was much later. After so much changed back.”

“Changed back from what?”

“See, when Natalie was little, my God, that girl lived for her father. He’d come through the door after class, and she’d run to him screaming with joy.” Sylvia Avery finally lifted her head. There was a distant smile on her face, her eyes seeing the long-ago memory. “Aaron would pick her up and twirl her and she’d laugh so hard . . .”

She shook her head. “We were all so damn happy.”

“What happened, Miss Avery?”

“He ran off.”

“Why?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does.”

“Poor Natalie. She couldn’t let it go and now . . .”

“Now what?”

“You don’t understand. You can never understand.”

“Then make me understand.”

“Why? Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the man who loves her,” I said. “I’m the man she loves.”

She didn’t know how to react to that. Her eyes were still on the floor, almost as though she didn’t have the strength to lift even her gaze. “When her father ran off, Natalie changed. She grew so sullen. I lost that little girl. It was like Aaron took her happiness with him. She couldn’t accept it. Why would her father abandon her? What did she do wrong? Why didn’t he love her anymore?”

I pictured this, my Natalie as a child, feeling lost and abandoned by her own father. I could feel the pain in my chest.

“She had trust issues for so long. You have no idea. She pushed everyone away and yet she never gave up hope.” She looked up at me. “Do you know anything about hope, Jake?”

“I think I do,” I said.

“It’s the cruelest thing in the world. Death is better. When you’re dead, the pain stops. But hope keeps raising you way up high, only to drop you to the hard ground. Hope cradles your heart in its hand and then it crushes it with a fist. Over and over. It never stops. That’s what hope does.”

She put her hands on her lap and looked at me hard. “So, you see, I tried to take that hope away.”

I nodded. “You tried to make Natalie forget about her father,” I said.

“Yes.”

“By saying he ran off and abandoned all of you?”

Her eyes began to well up. “I thought that was best. Do you see? I thought that would make Natalie forget him.”

“You told Natalie that her father got remarried,” I said. “You told her that he had other children. But all that was a lie, wasn’t it?”

Sylvia Avery wouldn’t answer. The expression on her face hardened.

“Miss Avery?”

She looked up at me. “Leave me alone.”

“I need to know—”

“I don’t care what you need to know. I want you to leave me alone.”

She started to wheel back. I grabbed hold of her chair. The chair came to a sudden halt. The blanket on her lap fell toward the floor. When I looked down, my hand released the chair without any command from her. Half of her right leg had been amputated. She pulled the blanket up, slower than she had to. She wanted me to see.

“Diabetes,” she said to me. “I lost it three years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Believe me, it was nothing.” I reached out again, but she knocked my hand away. “Good-bye, Jake. Leave my family alone.” She started to wheel back. No choice now. I had to go nuclear.

“Do you remember a student named Archer Minor?”

Her chair stopped. Her mouth went slack.

“Archer Minor was enrolled in your husband’s class at Lanford,” I said. “Do you remember him?”

“How . . . ?” Her lips moved but no words came out for a few moments. Then: “Please.” If her voice had sounded merely frightened before, she was downright terrified now. “Please leave this alone.”

“Archer Minor is dead, you know. He was murdered.”

“Good riddance,” she said, and then she shut her mouth tightly, as though she regretted the words the moment they came out.

“Please tell me what happened.”

“Let it go.”

“I can’t.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with you. It isn’t your business.” She shook her head. “It makes sense.”

“What does?”

“That Natalie would fall for you.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re a dreamer, like her father. He couldn’t let things go either. Some people can’t. I’m an old woman. Listen to me. The world is messy, Jake. Some people want it to be black-and-white. Those people always pay a price. My husband was one of them. He couldn’t let it go. And you, Jake, are heading down that same path.”

I heard distant echoes in her past, from Malcolm Hume and Eban Trainor, from Benedict too. I thought about my own recent thoughts, about what it had felt like to punch and even kill a man.

“What happened with Archer Minor?” I asked.

“You won’t quit. You’ll keep digging until everyone dies.”

“It will stay between you and me,” I said. “It won’t leave this room. Just tell me.”

“And if I say no?”

“I’ll keep digging. What happened with Archer Minor?”

She looked off again, fingers plucking at her lip as though in deep thought. I sat up a little straighter, trying to meet her eye.

“You know how they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That kid tried. Archer Minor wanted to be the apple that fell and rolled away. He wanted to be good. He wanted to escape what he was. Aaron understood that. He tried to help him.”

She took her time adjusting the blanket in her lap.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Archer was in over his head at Lanford. In high school his father could pressure the teachers. They gave him A’s. I don’t know if he really earned that high SAT score on his résumé. I don’t know how he got past admissions, but academically, that boy was in over his head.”

She stopped again.

“Please go on.”

“There’s no reason,” she said.

Then I remembered something Mrs. Dinsmore had said when I first asked her about Professor Aaron Kleiner.

“There was a cheating scandal, wasn’t there?”

Her body language told me that I’d hit pay dirt.

“Did it involve Archer Minor?” I asked.

She didn’t reply. She didn’t have to.

“Miss Avery?”

“He bought a term paper from a student who’d graduated the year before. The other student had gotten an A on it. Archer just retyped it and handed it in as his own. Didn’t change one single word. He figured there’d be no way Aaron would remember. But Aaron remembers everything.”

I knew the school rules. That sort of cheating was an automatic expulsion at Lanford.

“Did your husband report him?”

“I told him not to. I told him to give Archer a second chance. I didn’t care about the second chance, of course. I just knew.”

“You knew his family would be upset.”

“Aaron reported it anyway.”

“To whom?”

“The chairman of the department.”

My heart sank. “Malcolm Hume?”

“Yes.”

I sat back. “What did Malcolm say?”

“He wanted Aaron to drop it. He said to go home and think about it.”

I thought back to my case with Eban Trainor. He had said something similar to me, hadn’t he? Malcolm Hume. You do not get to be secretary of state without compromise, without cutting deals and negotiating terms and understanding that the world was loaded up with gray.

“I’m very tired, Jake.”

“I don’t understand something.”

“Let it go.”

“Archer Minor was never reported. He graduated summa cum laude.”

“We started getting threatening phone calls. A man visited me. He came into the house when I was in the shower. When I came out, he was just sitting on my bed. He was holding pictures of Natalie and Julie. He didn’t say anything. He just sat on my bed and held the pictures. Then he got up and left. Can you imagine what that was like?”