How hard would it be to get out of this jail? What if, like in all the video games, he could do some fancy kung fu move and deck this guard, and another, and another, until he was able to race out the door and suck in the air whose taste he’d already started to forget?

What if he had to stay here forever?

That was when he remembered what had happened to his fish. In a sweeping moment of animal rights and humanity, Peter had taken Wolverine and flushed him down the toilet. He figured that the plumbing emptied out into some big ocean, like the one his family had gone to last summer on a beach vacation, and that maybe Wolverine could find his way back to Japan and his other beta relatives. It was after Peter confided in his brother that Joey told him about sewers, and that instead of giving his pet freedom, Peter had killed it.

The officer stopped in front of a room whose door read PRIVATE CONFERENCE. He couldn’t imagine who would visit him, except for his parents, and he didn’t want to see them yet. They would ask him questions he couldn’t answer-about how you could tuck a son into bed, and not recognize him the next morning. Maybe it would be easier to just go back to the camera in his cell, which stared but didn’t pass judgment.

“Here you go,” the officer said, and he opened the door.

Peter took a shuddering breath. He wondered what his fish had thought, expecting the cool blue of the sea, only to wind up swimming in shit.

Jordan walked into the Grafton County Jail and stopped at the check-in point. He had to sign in before he went to visit Peter Houghton and get a visitor’s badge from the correctional officer on the other side of the Plexiglas divider. Jordan reached for the clipboard and scrawled his name, then pushed it through the tiny slot at the bottom of the plastic wall-but there was no one there to receive it. The two COs inside were huddled around a small black-and-white TV that was tuned, like every other television on the planet, to a news report about the shooting.

“Excuse me,” Jordan said, but neither man turned.

“When the shooting began,” the reporter was saying, “Ed McCabe peered out the door of his ninth-grade math classroom, putting himself between the gunman and his students.”

The screen cut to a sobbing woman, identified in white block letters below her face as JOAN MCCABE, SISTER OF VICTIM. “He cared about his kids,” she wept. “He cared about them the whole seven years he’d taught at Sterling, and he cared about them during the last minute of his life.”

Jordan shifted his weight. “Hello?”

“Just a second, buddy,” one correctional officer said, waving an absent hand in his direction.

The reporter appeared again on the grainy screen, his hair blowing upward like a boat’s sail in the light wind, the monotone brick of the school a wall behind him. “Fellow teachers remember Ed McCabe as a committed teacher who was always willing to go the extra mile to help a student, and as an avid outdoorsman who talked often in the faculty room about his dreams to hike through Alaska. A dream,” the reporter said gravely, “that will never come to pass.”

Jordan took the clipboard and shoved it through the slot in the Plexiglas, so that it clattered on the floor. Both correctional officers turned at once.

“I’m here to see my client,” he said.

Lewis Houghton had never missed a lecture in the nineteen years he’d been a professor at Sterling College, until today. When Lacy had called he’d left in such a hurry that he hadn’t even thought to put a sign on the lecture hall’s door. He imagined students waiting for him to appear, waiting to take notes on the very words that came out of his mouth, as if the things he had to say were still beyond reproach.

What word, what platitude, what comment of his had led Peter to this?

What word, what platitude, what comment might have stopped him?

He and Lacy were sitting in their backyard, waiting for the police to leave the house. Well, they had left-or at least one of them-to broaden the search warrant, most likely. Lewis and Lacy had not been allowed into their own home for the duration of the search. For a while, they’d stood in the driveway, occasionally watching officers carry out bags and boxes full of things Lewis would have expected-computers, books from Peter’s room-and things he hadn’t-a tennis racket, a jumbo box of waterproof matches.

“What do we do?” Lacy murmured.

He shook his head, numb. For one of his journal articles on the value of happiness, he’d interviewed elderly folks who were suicidal. What’s left for us? they’d said, and at the time, Lewis had not been able to understand that utter lack of hope. At the time, he couldn’t imagine the world going so sour that you couldn’t see the way to set it to rights.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Lewis replied, and he meant it. He watched an officer walk out holding a stack of Peter’s old comic books.

When he’d first come home to find Lacy pacing the driveway, she’d flung herself into his arms. “Why,” she had sobbed. “Why?”

There were a thousand questions in that one, but Lewis couldn’t answer any of them. He’d held on to his wife as if she were driftwood in the middle of this flood, and then he had noticed the eyes of a neighbor across the street, peeking from a drawn curtain.

That’s when they had moved to the backyard. They sat on the porch swing, surrounded by a thicket of bare branches and melting snow. Lewis sat perfectly still, his fingers and lips numb from cold, from shock.

“Do you think,” Lacy whispered, “it’s our fault?”

He stared at her, amazed at her bravery: she’d put into words what he hadn’t allowed himself to even think. But what else was left to say between them? The shootings had happened; their son was involved. You couldn’t argue the facts; you could only change the lens through which you looked at them.

Lewis bent his head. “I don’t know.” Where did you even begin to look at those statistics? Had it happened because Lacy had picked Peter up too much as a baby? Or because Lewis had pretended to laugh when Peter took a tumble, hoping that the toddler wouldn’t cry if he didn’t think there was anything to cry about? Should they have monitored more closely what he read, watched, listened to…or would smothering him have led to the same outcome? Or maybe it was the combination of Lacy and Lewis together. If a couple’s children counted as a track record, then they had failed miserably.

Twice.

Lacy stared down at the intricate brickwork between her shoes. Lewis remembered laying this patio; he’d leveled the sand and set the brick himself. Peter had wanted to help, but Lewis hadn’t let him. The bricks were too heavy. You could get hurt, he’d said.

If Lewis had been less protective-if Peter had felt true pain, might he have been less likely to inflict it?

“What was the name of Hitler’s mother?” Lacy asked.

Lewis blinked at her. “What?”

“Was she awful?”

He put his arm around Lacy. “Don’t do this to yourself,” he murmured.

She buried her face in his shoulder. “Everyone else will.”

For just a moment, Lewis let himself believe that everyone was mistaken-that Peter couldn’t have been the shooter today. In a way, this was true-although there had been hundreds of witnesses, the boy they’d seen was not the same one Lewis had talked to last night before he went to bed. They’d had a conversation about Peter’s car.

You know you have to get it inspected by the end of the month, Lewis had said.

Yeah, Peter had replied. I already made an appointment.

Had he been lying about that, too?

“The lawyer-”

“He said he’ll call us,” Lewis answered.

“Did you tell him Peter’s allergic to shellfish? If they feed him any-”

“I told him,” Lewis said, although he hadn’t. He pictured Peter, sitting alone in a cell at a jail he’d driven by every summer, en route to the Haverhill Fairgrounds. He thought of Peter, calling home on the second night of sleepaway camp, begging to be picked up. He thought of his son, who was still his son, even if he had done something so horrible that Lewis could not close his eyes without imagining the worst; and then his ribs felt too tight and he couldn’t draw in enough air.