My car was still there, so the first call was to AAA, to tow it to my repair shop and replace the two tires. Then I settled down to the business on my desk until Mercer arrived with Paige Vallis almost an hour later.

I closed my door to give us more privacy. She didn't need to go over the facts again. The events of March 6 were indelibly etched in her mind's eye. I knew that if I questioned her about them now, it would heighten her state of nervousness, as well as take the emotional edge off the presentation she would make to the jury. Instead, we talked about what I thought the pace of the trial would be and when we might expect to go to verdict.

"Andrew's lawyer?" Paige asked.

"Robelon. Peter Robelon. What about him?"

"Do you have any better sense of what he's going to do to me?"

We had been over this countless times, and Paige didn't like it better than any other witness. When the assailant in a sexual assault case was a stranger, the defense did not have to attack the victim. They could acknowledge that a vicious crime had occurred, and suggest that the woman was tragically mistaken in her identification of the defendant. Poor lighting, little opportunity to see his face clearly, and general hysteria were the traditional arguments against a reliable identification by a rape victim. All of that changed when DNA technology replaced the survivor's visual memory as the means of confirming who her attacker had been.

But it was terribly different when a woman was assaulted by someone known to her-a friend, a coworker, a lover, or an ex-boyfriend. More than 80 percent of sexual assaults occurred between people who knew each other, so identification was not the issue at trial. Yet these victims were far more likely to have their credibility attacked in the courtroom.

Mercer was standing beside his witness, removing the lids on the cardboard coffee containers he had brought for each of us. "It's like Alex has been telling you all along, Paige. Robelon can only go one way in this case. He can't say it never happened and that you're making this whole thing up. The presence of Tripping's DNA makes that impossible."

"So it's that I consented? That I'm lying about this, right?"

I nodded my head.

"Will the jury already know that when I walk into the room and take the stand? I mean, does he just say that when he addresses them the first time?"

"I'm sure he'll plant that seed in their minds," I said. Robelon was a good lawyer and likely to be more subtle than most. I didn't think he would outright accuse Paige Vallis of being a liar. Rather, he would paint the jury a picture in very broad strokes, setting them up to believe that she had been hungry for this relationship, pursuing Andrew Tripping and unhappy when something went wrong during the night in question.

I hated this moment in the process. I hated being the person who had to deliver the victim into the hands of my adversary, in public view, to tell this story of trust and betrayal to a courtroom full of strangers. In the months since Paige reported the crime, I had struggled with Mercer to gain her confidence, to ask about intimacies that most people never discuss outside of their bedrooms. Now that I had gained that acceptance, I could not give her a victory without first exposing her to public humiliation and dissection.

"Will there be newspaper reporters at the trial?" she asked.

"I don't expect any. So far they haven't expressed interest in the case, and I can't imagine why that would change. Did you end up asking a friend to come with you? Anyone to sit in the courtroom for moral support?"

Paige gnawed at the corner of her lip and twisted a handkerchief in her hands. "No. I haven't got much family. Distant relatives are all. And my closest girlfriend told me to forget about going through a trial, to walk away from the whole thing."

My paralegal, Maxine, would be her anchor during the trial. They had worked together since Paige's first interview here, and I had encouraged them to talk to each other regularly. Maxine would be the virtual handholder for her through these next difficult hours.

"Do you think Andrew will take the stand?"

"I haven't a clue at this point, Paige." So much of that will depend on how you do, I thought to myself. Robelon did not have to make that decision until I had completed my case and rested. If Paige held up well throughout cross-examination, then he might gauge it necessary to let Andrew Tripping speak to the jurors. It could be a real problem for the defense, since the "bad acts" that had been ruled inadmissible on my direct case were things I could question him about if he chose to testify on his own behalf.

She could see that I was frustrated by my inability to give her definite answers about so much of what we were facing. "It seems so unbalanced," she said, forcing a wan smile. "You have to tell them everything about your case, and about me, but they don't have any obligation to do the same."

I returned the smile. "You've got to relax a bit and let me worry about that. It's a very uneven playing field, but Mercer and I are used to it."

I stood up to move Paige into the adjacent conference room and give her a newspaper to read for the time remaining before we went to court. "Alex, one more thing. Did you get a ruling about my sexual history? I mean, can Mr. Robelon ask about other men I've had intercourse with?" She colored deeply as she spoke to me.

We had talked about this issue before. "I thought I explained this to you," I said, sitting down again so I could look Paige directly in the eye. "That's why I gave you such a hard time about exactly what went on between you and Andrew on the three occasions you were together."

Like every witness I interviewed, I had pressed her aggressively about whether there was any kind of sexual overture or foreplay before the rape. It was common for many women to minimize or omit that fact from their narratives, fearful that a prosecutor would refuse to entertain a case in which there had been any sort of consensual conduct leading up to the crime.

"I've told you the truth about that, Alex."

"Then why are you worried? Nothing else is relevant."

"I went on-line last night," she said, now wringing the handkerchief between her hands. "I started to look up articles about cases that had been written up in the newspapers. Sort of to see what to expect."

I guess everything I had told her had not provided enough reassurance.

"I found a long feature in the Times that quoted you last year, talking about how bad the laws used to be. It kept me up all night."

"That's old news, Paige. That's all changed now." Rape shield laws had passed in every state in America in the last quarter of the twentieth century, protecting victims from questioning about their sexual activity with men other than the defendant. But until that time, a woman who had ever had intercourse prior to the rape-who was "unchaste"-was assumed to have consented to the act with the man on trial. The courts defined the ideal victim as a "virgin of uncontaminated purity."

"But that case you cited in the article?" she asked.

"It was decided before I got to law school. It's history, Paige."

At the time I studied the case, I had been stunned and disgusted that in my lifetime there was still a court in this country that threw out a man's rape conviction because the accuser had not been a virgin. Using the flowery rhetoric that referenced ancient Roman history, the court had asked: "Will you not more readily infer assent in the practiced Messalina, in loose attire, than in the reserved and virtuous Lucretia?" The unfaithful wife of Claudius was the Eighth Judicial Circuit's vision of an unfit victim, just as they held up to the world the virtuous Lucretia, who killed herself rather than see her rapist brought to justice.