"She talks all the time and interrupts the other students and is always raising her hand to answer questions!" Dorothy blurted over the phone. "Do you know what her teacher wrote on her report card? Here! Let me read it to you! Lucy does not work and play well with others. She is a show-off and a know-it-all and is constantly taking things apart, such as the pencil sharpener and doorknobs"

Lucy is gay. That is probably most unfair of all because she can't outgrow it or get over it. Homosexuality is unfair because it creates unfairness. For that reason, it broke my heart when I found out this part of my niece's life. I desperately don't want her to suffer. I also force myself to admit that I have managed to ignore the obvious up until now. ATF isn't going to be generous or forgiving, and Lucy has probably known this for a while. Administration in D.C. won't look at all she has accomplished, but will focus on her through the distorting lens of prejudice and jealousy.

"It'll be a witch hunt," I say after Lucy has left the house.

Anna cracks eggs into a bowl.

"They want her gone, Anna."

She drops shells into the sink and opens the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of milk, glancing at the expiration date. "There are those who think she is a hero," she says.

"Law enforcement tolerates women. It doesn't celebrate them and punishes those who become heroes. That's the dirty little secret no one wants to talk about," I say.

Anna vigorously whips eggs with a fork.

"It's our same story," I continue. "We went to medical school in a day when we had to apologize for taking men's slots. In some cases, we were shunned, sabotaged. I had three other women in my first-year medical school class. How many did you have?"

"It was different in Vienna."

"Vienna?" My thoughts evaporate.

"Where I was trained," she informs me.

"Oh." I experience guilt again as I learn another detail I don't know about my good friend.

"When I came here, everything you are saying about how it is for women was exactly like that." Anna's mouth is set in a hard line as she pours egg batter into a cast-iron skillet. "I remember what it was like when I moved to Virginia. How I was treated."

"Believe me, I know all about it."

"I was thirty years ahead of you, Kay. You really don't know all about it."

Eggs steam and bubble. I lean against the counter, drinking black coffee, wishing I had been awake when Lucy came in last night, aching because I didn't talk to her. I had to find out her news like this, almost as a by the way. "Did she talk to you?" I ask Anna. "About what she just told us?"

She folds the eggs over and over. "Looking back on it, I think she showed up with champagne because she wanted to tell you. Rather an inappropriate effect, considering her news." She pops multi-grain English muffins out of the toaster. "It is easy to assume that psychiatrists have such deep conversations with everyone, when in truth, people rarely tell me their true feelings, even when they pay me by the hour." She carries our plates to the table. "Mostly, people tell me what they think. That is the problem. People think too much."

"They won't be blatant." I am preoccupied with ATE again as Anna and I sit across from each other. "Their attack will be covert, like the FBI. And in truth, the FBI ran her off for the same reason. She was their rising star, a computer wizard, a helicopter pilot, the first female member of the Hostage Rescue Team," I rash through Lucy's resume as Anna's expression turns increasingly skeptical. We both know it is unnecessary for me to recite all this. She has known Lucy since Lucy was a child. "Then the gay card was played." I can't stop. "Well, she left them for ATF and here we go again.

On and on, history repeated. Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Because you are consuming yourself with Lucy's problems when your own loom larger than Mont Blanc."

My attention wanders out the window. A blue jay helps himself to the bird feeder, feathers ruffling, sunflower seeds falling and peppering the snowy earth like lead shot. Pale fingers of sunlight probe the overcast morning. I nervously turn my coffee cup in small circles on the table. My elbow throbs slowly and deeply as we eat. Whatever my problems are, I resist talking about them, as if to voice them will somehow give them life_as if they don't have life already. Anna doesn't push. We are quiet. Silverware clinks against plates and snow drifts down more thickly, frosting shrubbery and trees and hovering foggily over the river. I return to my room and take a long, hot bath, my cast propped on the side of the tub. I am dressing with difficulty, realizing that I am not likely to ever master tying shoes with one hand, when the doorbell rings. Moments later, Anna knocks and asks me if I am decent.

Thoughts bloom darkly and roll like storms. I am not expecting company. "Who is it?" I call out.

"Buford Righter," she says.

BEHIND HIS BACK, THE CITY COMMONWEALTH'S AT -torney is called many things: Easy Righter (he is weak), Righter Wrong (wishy-washy), Fighter Righter (anything but), Booford (scared of his own shadow). Always proper, always appropriate, Righter is always the Virginia gentleman he was trained to be in the Caroline County horse country of his roots. No one loves him. No one hates him. He is neither feared nor respected. Righter has no fire. I can't recall ever seeing him emotional, no matter how cruel or heart-wrenching the case. Worse, he is squeamish when it comes to the details I bring to the forum, preferring to focus on points of law and not the appalling human messiness left by its violations.

His avoidance of the morgue has resulted in his not being as well versed in forensic science and medicine as he ought to be. In fact, he is the only seasoned prosecutor I know who doesn't seem to mind stipulating cause of death. In other words, he allows the paper record to speak for the medical examiner in the courtroom. This is a travesty. To me it constitutes malpractice. When the medical examiner isn't in the courtroom, then, in a sense, neither is the body, and jurors don't envision the victim or what he went through during the process of dying violently. Clinical words on protocols simply don't evoke the terror or the suffering, and for this reason, it is usually the defense, not the prosecution, who wants to stipulate cause of death.

"Buford, how are you?" I hold out my hand and he glances at my cast and my sling, and down at my untied shoelaces and my shirttail hanging out. He has never seen me in anything less than a suit and in a setting that befits my professional rank, and his brow knits into an expression that is supposed to evince genteel compassion and understanding, the humility and caring of those handpicked by God to rule the rest of us lesser creatures. His type abounds among the first families of Virginia, a privileged, dusty people who have refined the skill of disguising their elitism and arrogance beneath a heavy aura of burden, as if it is so damn hard to be them.

"The question is, how are you?" he says, sitting back down in Anna's handsome oval living room with its vaulted ceiling and view of the river.

"I really don't know how to answer that, Buford." I choose a rocking chair. "Every time someone asks, my mind reboots." Anna must have just gotten the fire going and has vanished, and I have the uneasy sensation that her absence is about more than her being politely unobtrusive.

"No small wonder. Don't even know how you're able to function after what you've been through." Righter speaks with a syrupy Virginia drawl. "Sure am sorry to barge in like this, Kay, but something's come up, something unexpected. Nice place, isn't it?" He continues to survey his surroundings. "She build or was it already here?"