After the verdict was handed down, Jordan met with Peter in the holding cell. He’d be brought back to the jail only until the sentencing hearing; then he would be transferred to the state prison in Concord. Serving out eight consecutive murder sentences, he would not leave it alive.

“You okay?” Jordan asked, putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I sort of knew it was going to happen.”

“But they heard you. That’s why they came back with manslaughter for two of the counts.”

“I guess I should say thanks for trying.” He smiled crookedly at Jordan. “Have a good life.”

“I’ll come see you, if I get down to Concord,” Jordan said.

He looked at Peter. In the six months since this case had fallen into his lap, his client had grown up. Peter was as tall as Jordan now. He probably weighed a little more. He had a deeper voice, a shadow of beard on his jaw. Jordan marveled that he hadn’t noticed these things until now.

“Well,” Jordan said. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.”

“Me, too.”

Peter held out his hand, and Jordan embraced him instead. “Take care.”

He started out of the cell, and then Peter called him back. He was holding out the eyeglasses Jordan had brought him for the trial. “These are yours,” Peter said.

“Hang on to them. You have more use for them.”

Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan’s jacket. “I kind of like knowing you’re taking care of them,” he said. “And there isn’t all that much I really want to see.”

Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then he headed toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.

As he approached her, he put on Peter’s glasses. “What’s up with those?” she asked.

“I kind of like them.”

“You have perfect vision,” Selena pointed out.

Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to move more gingerly through it. “Not always,” he said.

In the weeks after the trial, Lewis began fooling around with numbers. He’d done some preliminary research and entered it into STATA to see what kinds of patterns emerged. And-here was the interesting thing-it had absolutely nothing to do with happiness. Instead, he’d started looking at the communities where school shootings had occurred in the past and spinning them out to the present, to see how a single act of violence might affect economic stability. Or in other words-once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?

He was teaching again at Sterling College-basic microeconomics. Classes had only just begun in late September, and Lewis found himself slipping easily into the lecture circuit. When he was talking about Keynesian models and widgets and competition, it was routine-so effortless that he could almost make himself believe this was any other freshman survey course he’d taught in the past, before Peter had been convicted.

Lewis taught by walking up and down the aisles-a necessary evil, now that the campus had gone WiFi and students would play online poker or IM each other while he lectured-which was how he happened to come across the kids in the back. Two football players were taking turns squeezing a sports-top water bottle so that the stream arced upward and sprayed onto the back of another kid’s neck. The boy, two rows forward, kept turning around to see who was squirting water at him, but by then, the jocks were looking up at the graphs on the screen in the front of the hall, their faces as smooth as choirboys’.

“Now,” Lewis said, not missing a beat, “who can tell me what happens if you set the price above point A on the graph?” He plucked the water bottle out of the hands of one of the jocks. “Thank you, Mr. Graves. I was getting thirsty.”

The boy two rows ahead raised his hand like an arrow, and Lewis nodded at him. “No one would want to buy the widget for that much money,” he said. “So demand would fall, and that means the price would have to drop, or they’d wind up with a whole boatload of extras in the warehouse.”

“Excellent,” Lewis said, and he glanced up at the clock. “All right, guys, on Monday we’ll be covering the next chapter in Mankiw. And don’t be surprised if there’s a surprise quiz.”

“If you told us, it’s not a surprise,” a girl pointed out.

Lewis smiled. “Oops.”

He stood by the chair of the boy who’d given the right answer. He was stuffing his notebook into his backpack, which was already so crammed with papers that the zipper wouldn’t close. His hair was too long, and his T-shirt had a picture of Einstein’s face on it. “Nice work today.”

“Thanks.” The boy shifted from one foot to the other; Lewis could tell that he wasn’t quite sure what to say next. He thrust out his hand. “Um, nice to meet you. I mean, you’ve already met us all, but not, like, personally.”

“Right. What’s your name again?”

“Peter. Peter Granford.”

Lewis opened up his mouth to speak, but then just shook his head.

“What?” The boy ducked his head. “You just, uh, looked like you were going to say something important.”

Lewis looked at this namesake, at the way he stood with his shoulders rounded, as if he did not deserve so much space in this world. He felt that familiar pain that fell like a hammer on his breastbone whenever he thought of Peter, of a life that would be lost to prison. He wished he’d taken more time to look at Peter when Peter was right in front of his eyes, because now he would be forced to compensate with imperfect memories or-even worse-to find his son in the faces of strangers.

Lewis reached deep inside and unraveled the smile that he saved for moments like this, when there was absolutely nothing to be happy about. “It was important,” he said. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”

It took Lacy three weeks to gather the courage to enter Peter’s bedroom. Now that the verdict had been handed down-now that they knew Peter would never be coming home again-there was no reason to keep it as she had for the past five months: a shrine, a haven for optimism.

She sat down on Peter’s bed and brought his pillow to her face. It still smelled like him, and she wondered how long it would take for that to dissipate. She glanced around at the scattered books on his shelves-the ones that the police had not taken. She opened his nightstand drawer and fingered the silky tassel of a bookmark, the metal teeth of a lockjawed stapler. The empty belly of a television remote control, missing its batteries. A magnifying glass. An old pack of Pokémon cards, a magic trick, a portable hard drive on a key-chain.

Lacy took the box she’d brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was the crime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.

She folded his quilt, and then his sheets, and then pulled the pillowcase free. She suddenly recalled a dinner conversation where Lewis had told her that for $10,000, you could flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it took to destroy something than it did to build it in the first place: in less than an hour, this room would look as if Peter had never lived here at all.

When it was all a neat pile, Lacy sat back down on the bed and looked around at the stark walls, the paint a little brighter in the spots where posters had been. She touched the piped seam of Peter’s mattress and wondered how long she would continue to think of it as Peter’s.

Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. It couldn’t save a single child-not the ones who’d gone to Sterling High that day, expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love, mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?