“And what happened to this guy?”

A long pause. “Well, he was simple. What people call retarded, sometimes, although my parents don’t like that word.”

“It’s just a word.”

She shot him a look, as if on the verge of contradicting him, then changed her mind. “That’s true. It’s just a word.” He liked that, the way she repeated after him. “He couldn’t understand the things he did. He never meant to harm anyone or anything. Once, he petted a puppy to death.”

“People who hurt dogs are the lowest of the low.”

“But he wasn’t trying to hurt the dog. He was just petting it. He didn’t know how strong he was. That was his problem.”

“What happened to him?”

He could see her considering a lie, then rejecting it. “His friend killed him. He was too pure for this world. That’s what my teacher said. He was forever a child, but in a man’s body, and he couldn’t live in this world.”

He was taken with that phrase. Forever a child, in a man’s body. It touched on something he felt about himself. Not being a child, of course. He was the opposite of simple. He was complicated. That was his problem, most likely. He was too complicated, too thoughtful, too full of ideas to have the life that people expected him to have. He should have been born somewhere intense, interesting, not in a little town where people didn’t have get-up-and-get. Dallas, for example, which struck him as a place that rewarded ambition and masculinity. All the men on that television show, even the wimpy ones, were men’s men, big and strong. Maybe they should go to Dallas.

And it would have to be “they,” at least for a while. He couldn’t let her go, but he also couldn’t do anything more definitive, not yet. That was the downside of spending too much time with someone, especially someone whose fears and dreams swam across her face. It was like naming the Thanksgiving turkey. Not that a name had ever kept him from petitioning for the drumstick, come the day.

“Do you know more stories?” he asked her. “Like the one you just told, only maybe happier?”

“Well, the same guy who wrote that, he drove around the country with his poodle, Charley. I mean, for real.”

“And what happened?”

“Lots of things.”

“You can tell me while I’m driving.”

He let her use the bathroom, having checked ahead of time that it was a one-seater without a window to the outside, and there was a cigarette machine in the hallway, so he didn’t look odd, waiting there, pulling on the various handles, fishing for change. Once, when he was thirteen, he had found seventy-five cents in the pay phone at his father’s gas station, and that had seemed miraculous to him. A waitress-not the redhead, but an older woman-glanced back at him, curious, and he said, just thought of it out of the blue: “Her first, um, time, you know? With her ladies’ issues? And our mama’s dead and she’s freaking out.”

“Poor thing. Should I ask her if she needs help?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. She’s shy. That would just make it worse.” The woman smiled, pleased with him. Maybe having a little sister would make him seem less threatening to women. Of course, this waitress was old, dried up, but maybe other women, women his age, would be charmed by a man taking care of his sister.

The pay phone gave him an idea, and he asked the waitress if she could change five dollars for him. He called his father’s shop and spoke to C.J., the woman who kept the books and answered the phones. He had joined the Marines, he told her. Sold the truck to a friend, cashed out his bank account, what little there was of it. (Later that day, he would hit an ATM-take whatever it would give him-or find a branch that might cash his check.) No, please don’t call his father to the phone. He would only yell. About his truck, not about his only son and coworker going off to join the Marines.

He hung up and listened to the various plumbing sounds, asking when she came out: “Did you wash your hands?” She shook her head, and he sent her back. She was a good girl. She would do whatever he told her to.

“THAT’S ENOUGH,” PETER SAID, when Eliza told him about the phone call the next morning as he prepared coffee for the enormous travel mug he toted to work each day. (She had been asleep when he arrived home, and although she roused when he slid into bed next to her, she hadn’t wanted to attempt a serious conversation so late. Besides, they had fallen in the habit of using Peter’s breakfast, that quiet lull after the children had left for school, to catch up.) “Who’s his lawyer? That should be easy enough to find out.”

“You’ll be late,” she said.

“This is worth being late for.”

Within five minutes on the computer and another five on the telephone, Peter was demanding to speak to Jefferson D. Blanding, an attorney with a nonprofit in Charlottesville. Eliza couldn’t help being thrilled by the way her husband came to her defense. It was one of the qualities she had admired in him, even when they were nothing more than friends. Peter took charge of everything and everyone, not just her. He didn’t have to be the boss, but when certain situations came to a head-a disagreement with someone over a bill, a contractor who refused to do what he had promised, a mix-up at an airline ticket counter-Peter took over. He was forceful without being rude, intent on finding solutions, as opposed to venting his anger in a bullying way. In England, this part of him had become a little muted, so it was particularly exciting to see it engaged again, and on her behalf.

“He was actually very nice, once he understood why I was calling,” Peter said. “I got the sense that he was even a little horrified, although he put it on the woman. He said she’s well meaning, but in over her head.”

“Who is she?”

“Barbara LaFortuny.”

“No.”

Peter laughed. “Yeah, and he swears it’s her real name. Sounds like a stage name for some exotic dancer.”

Eliza thought about the voice on the phone, the vinegary rasp. “How old a woman?”

“I didn’t ask, but I had the sense she’s in her forties or fifties. She was a schoolteacher in Baltimore city and she was attacked on the job several years ago, by a student with a knife. She won an undisclosed settlement from the system because the school had refused to remove the kid from her classroom despite repeated warnings. You think that would tilt her toward victims’ rights, but instead she became an advocate for prisoners. Got interested in conditions in state prisons, then began looking at the death penalty. Somehow came to befriend Walter.”

“She made a point of telling me she wasn’t one of those women. You know, the kind that fall in love with an inmate.”

“No, she’s not in love with him. But she’s grown obsessed with trying to get his execution stayed. More so than Walter, according to his lawyer. He said it’s possible she’s acting alone, without Walter’s knowledge.”

Eliza shook her head. The letter’s style, its cadences-those had been pure Walter.

“She wouldn’t have known me, by a photo. And I don’t see how she could have learned my married name. Walter wrote that he saw the photo, that he recognized me.” I’d know you anywhere. “Is this woman, Barbara, black?”

“It didn’t occur to me to ask. Why?”

“She didn’t sound black. But a Baltimore city schoolteacher and…” Her voice trailed off from embarrassment.

Peter smiled, shook a playful finger at her. “Are you racial profiling now, Eliza? Assuming a woman with an unusual name has to be black?”

“No, no,” she protested. “It was the detail about teaching in city schools-”

Peter started laughing.

“-teaching in the schools and being swayed to the issue of prisoners’ rights, despite being attacked.” But she was laughing now, too, unafraid of being exposed. She had never really understood the old saying “safe as houses,” but it described how she felt with Peter. Safe, solid, loved unconditionally. They had been a couple, an official couple, for six months before she told him about Walter. It had started with an argument about sleeping with the windows open. A reasonable request, on Peter’s part-the New England spring, late as ever, had finally delivered its first perfect night, and they lived on the third floor of a ramshackle apartment building favored by students. But she had been adamant, oddly adamant, growing angry and tearful. Awed by this obstinacy in the otherwise pliant, easygoing Eliza, Peter had yielded. The next morning, over waffles at O’Rourke’s, she had apologized. It had not been her intent to explain herself further, but she couldn’t stop. The story tumbled out, as if she had never told it before. And, in some ways, she hadn’t. Yes, she had testified. Yes, she had been deposed, interviewed repeatedly by various official sorts. Debriefed, in a sense, by her own parents, who also sent her to a gentle therapist.