The prosecutor started back. “The defendant chose to go out and get drunk. Is that what impaired his judgment enough to rape a girl? Maybe. Is his violent nature what caused him to rape a girl? Maybe. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he did it. And that the state has proved he did it, beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Mr. McAfee has offered you a lot of mumbo jumbo about Gillian’s actions and behavior . . . because he can’t offer you the truth.” Matt leaned over the counsel table, his finger two inches from Jack’s face. “But the truth is that this man went into the woods on April thirtieth, 2000. This man jumped Gillian Duncan and ripped her clothes off and forced her to have sex with him. This man,” Matt said, “is the one I’m asking you to convict today.”

Jack was brought back to the sheriff’s holding cell pending the jury’s verdict. The deputy who was on the front desk was an older man with a white handlebar mustache and a tendency to whistle “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” He nodded as Jack passed, en route to a six-by-six space that was beginning to feel frighteningly comfortable.

Jack stripped off his jacket and tie and lay down on the metal bunk, pressing his fists against his eyes. How big a difference could Catherine Marsh make? Jordan said it would depend on whether the jury wanted to hang its hat on her testimony, although to Jack, one young girl with a case of puppy love seemed an awfully meager reason for acquittal.

Once the jury handed back a conviction, he would be taken directly to the state penitentiary in Concord. If he were sentenced for the maximum term, he would be fifty-one years old when he was released. His hair would have gone gray, his stomach soft, his skin lined. He would have age spots on the backs of his hands, markers for all the empty years gone by.

He would miss the feel of snow on his face. And the taste of Irish whiskey. He would miss the pattern of his mother’s china and the luxurious width of a double bed and the thin orange line where dawn bled into day.

He would miss Addie.

In the distance, Jack could hear the muted conversation of the deputy in the front office. Maybe Jordan had come to tell him the verdict was in. Or maybe some other prisoner had been brought here, to purgatory, to wait.

The thick-soled shoes of the deputy squeaked on the linoleum, stopping in front of Jack’s cell. “I’m going to take a whiz,” he announced.

“Good for you.”

“I’m telling you this,” the deputy said slowly, “because I have no control over who comes through that door when I’m gone, if you understand what I’m saying.”

Jack didn’t. “Believe me, if some nut comes in here and shoots me in cold blood, I’d probably thank him for it.”

The deputy laughed, already halfway down the corridor. Jack lay back down, covering his eyes with his forearm.

“Jack.”

It wasn’t real-it couldn’t be. Addie stood on the other side of the bars, close enough to touch.

Without a word, Jack lunged forward, sticking his arms through the slatted steel and working them around her as best as he could. Her face came up to the cold metal, her nose and mouth jutting forward enough to meet his. She was pushing so hard to get closer that Jack could see red lines forming on her cheekbones and jaw, a cell of their own making.

His hands cupped her face, tilted her forehead against his. “I didn’t think I would get to see you,” he confessed.

“I traded the deputy a chocolate cream pie,” Addie said. “For five minutes.”

Bringing his lips up, he kissed her brow. “What would he have done for a whole meal?” Jack held her back when she would have burrowed closer, tracing his hands over the delicate bones in her face and the bridge of her nose, lighting slight as a butterfly on her eyelids and trailing her lips like a whisper, over and over.

“W-what are you doing?”

He stroked her brows, her widow’s peak. “Taking you with me,” Jack said.

In that moment, an incredible peace fell inside him. He would not be like the other prisoners in the state pen. He would never be like them, because he’d been exposed to something truly beautiful, and it had gotten into his system. For the rest of his life, he would carry it around, hot as a secret under his skin, and just as jealously guarded.

“I will never forget you, Addie Peabody,” Jack said softly, covering her mouth once more.

He tasted of grief. She swallowed his sorrow like a seed, and breathed hope to the center of him. “You won’t have to,” Addie promised. “I’ll be here waiting.”

The sound of the deputy hurrying down the hall made Addie step back, although her hands still rested loosely in Jack’s. “Sorry to break this up,” the man said, “but you have to go.”

“I understand,” Addie said, her throat closing like a bud.

“Not you, ma’am.” The deputy turned to Jack. “Verdict’s in already.”

Some of the jury looked at him; some didn’t. “It’s normal,” Jordan assured him. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Mr. Foreman,” Judge Justice said, “have you reached a verdict?”

The cameras buzzed behind Jack’s shoulder, and he concentrated very hard on making the muscles of his legs work. If he were being recorded for posterity, he wanted to be sure he could stand on his own two feet.

“We have, Your Honor,” the foreman said.

“Will the defendant please rise?”

Jordan locked his arm through Jack’s, to draw him to his feet. Weak-kneed, Jack managed to remain upright and breathing.

“Mr. Foreman, how do you find the defendant on the charge of aggravated felonious sexual assault?”

Jack glanced at the jury, still poker-faced. The foreman looked at the paper he held in his hands. A thousand years later, he read, “Not guilty.”

The cry of outrage from Amos Duncan was drowned out by the immediate whoop of delight behind Jack, as Selena Damascus hopped the barricade and threw herself into Jordan’s arms. And then Addie was in his own, and Jordan was shaking his hand, telling him he’d known it would turn out this way all along.

The world revolved, a haze of glances and jurors and camera lenses. “The defendant is free to go,” the judge called over the melee, and that one word fixed in Jack’s consciousness and bloomed, obliterating all the noise and joy and surprise of the moment. Free. Free to go home. Free to shout out his innocence in the middle of the town green. Free to pick up the yarn of his life and see how it would knit together.

A liberated man, Jack turned around with a grin on his face-and found himself staring at the people of Salem Falls, who now had even more reason to hate him.

Amos Duncan wanted to take the prosecutor apart, piece by piece. “You said he’d be locked up for years,” the man growled. “And now I have to see him on the streets of the town where my daughter and I live?”

Matt couldn’t possibly feel any worse than Duncan wanted him to feel. Losing cases was always a disappointment . . . losing one that seemed to be open and shut was downright devastating.

“What can I say?” Matt answered humbly. “Amos, Gillian-I’m so sorry.” He began to gather his notes and papers, stuffing them haphazardly into his briefcase.

“I hope you carry this with you, Houlihan,” Duncan spat. “I hope you can’t sleep at night, knowing he’s out there.”

In counterpoint to her blustering father, Gillian’s voice was quiet and firm. “You said it was a sure thing.”

Matt glanced at her. He looked at Amos Duncan, too. Then he thought of McAfee’s closing, of the atropine in Gillian’s blood sample, of Catherine Marsh testifying that she’d been afraid of her father. “Nothing’s a sure thing,” he muttered, and he walked up the aisle of the courtroom, heading home.

The champagne bottle popped, shooting its cork into the ceiling of Jordan’s porch. Foam sprayed and ran down the sides, soaking Selena’s toes and the wooden slats beneath her feet. “To justice!” she cried, pouring some into Dixie cups.