Dean’s fingers twitched like he’d been electrocuted, then tightened in his lap. “I’m very sorry about how that all turned out.”

“How that all turned out?” That’s what I’d come here for? Some vague politician’s apology skirting any real responsibility? My eyes turned to slits, a million crow’s-feet everywhere, but I didn’t care. “How about ‘I’m sorry for taking advantage of you when you were fourteen years old and wasted out of your mind’? ‘I’m sorry for trying to do it again at Olivia’s house, and for slapping you across the’—”

“Stop filming this.” Dean swung his wheelchair at the camera, his agility so shocking it silenced me.

The cameraman glanced questioningly at Aaron. “Stop filming this,” Dean repeated, advancing on him in a slow smooth roll.

The cameraman was still waiting for Aaron to make the call, but he was just standing there, white-faced and dazed. It dawned on me suddenly that everything I’d just said to Dean had shocked him. Either Dean had glazed over the details of that night, or this was the first time Aaron was hearing it. He wants to apologize. Set the record straight. Aaron, I realized, had no idea how much Dean had to apologize for. “Aaron?” the cameraman asked, and Aaron seemed to come online. He cleared his throat and said, “Nathan, stop filming.”

I addressed Dean’s back with a sharp laugh. “Why do you even want to do this, Dean? If we can’t say anything about anything that actually happened.” I stood, the simple ability to do so a powerful weapon.

Dean maneuvered a turn. At least my albatross wasn’t physical, wasn’t a place where I was doomed to sit all my life. I understood, oddly, that it was almost worse for Dean that the end of his twenties hadn’t attacked him the way it had others. He still had a good scoop of hair, still had that lithe definition to his upper body. One esteemed line crossed his forehead like a fold in an envelope, but that was all. At least if he’d withered under the weight of the years, it wouldn’t be such a spectacular waste to be trapped halfway to the ground for all eternity.

Of course he was married to a bombshell, heels and a heavy lip at the breakfast table, glossy trimmings I still had to make myself resist, Mom’s brash version of beauty ground deep into my bones. I’d heard her speak in a clip from the Today show—southern, on the crazy side of religious. Probably didn’t believe in sex before marriage, or sex for anything other than procreation at that, which worked out well for Dean. I’m pretty sure he can’t appreciate any of the lusty prowess we promise on the cover of The Women’s Magazine. Arthur made sure of that much.

Dean checked over his shoulder at the crew. “This isn’t being filmed, right?”

Aaron said, just a little bit testily, “Do you see a camera pointed at you?”

Then, “Can you give TifAni and me some privacy, please?”

Aaron looked at me. I nodded and mouthed “It’s fine.”

The cameraman pointed at the sky, bubbling over with clouds again. “We really should get this shot before it rains.”

Aaron jerked his head, a signal to retreat. “We’ll get it.”

The crew trailed Aaron, his long strides widening the distance between us. Dean waited until the crew collected by the road before turning on me. One vein jumped in his jaw, twice, then rested.

“Can you sit?”

“I prefer to stand, thanks.”

Dean rocked on his wheels. “Ohh-kay.” The corner of his mouth curled up suddenly. “Are you getting married?”

My hand dangling by my side was right at his eye level. For once, I’d forgotten my emerald pride, all its magical, transformative powers. I spread my fingers wide and flat and looked down, the way girls always do when someone notices and asks. The excitement rushing in so fast it’s like it’s new again. The thing may as well have been a dead bug the way I regarded it. “In three weeks.”

“Congratulations.”

I tucked my hands in my back pockets. “Can you just get to it, Dean?”

“Tif, honestly—”

“I actually go by Ani now.”

Dean stuck out his lower lip and repeated the name in his head, “Like the end of—”

“TifAni.”

He turned it over to see how it fit. “Pretty,” he concluded.

I kept very still to let him see how little his opinion mattered. The sky quivered, and one lone raindrop made a plea for urgency on Dean’s nose. “Well, first, I want to apologize to you,” Dean said. “I have wanted to do that for a long time.” He held eye contact with me much too intensely, like a media coach had taught him, this is how you give an apology. “The way I treated you”—an exhale vibrated on his fat lips—“it was very wrong, and I’m so sorry.”

I closed my eyes. Kept them shut until I’d generated enough power to swallow the ache of memory. Smoothed over, I opened them again. “But you don’t want to say this on camera.”

“I will say this on camera,” Dean said. “I’ll apologize for the wrongful accusations I made against you. Saying that you took the gun because you were in on this with Arthur and Ben”—I opened my mouth, but Dean held up a hand, the one with the silver band smiling around his own ring finger. “Tif—Ani, I mean—you can choose to believe this or not, but at the time I really did think you were involved. Imagine how it looked to me. You come running in and I know you and Arthur are friends and I know how angry you must be with me and he hands you the gun and basically tells you to finish me off and you reached for it.”

“But I was terrified. I was begging for my life. You saw that too.”

“I know, but it was all jumbled up to me,” Dean said. “I’d lost all this blood and I was terrified too. All I knew was that he handed you the gun and you went to take it. Those cops, they came at me so sure you had done it. I was just, confused . . . and angry.” He rolled in his wheelchair, meaningfully. “I was angry. Arthur and Ben were dead, and you were still alive to take my anger out on.”

That was something Dan the lawyer had actually warned me about. That with the real villains dead, everyone was looking for a target, and I looked pretty right for it.

I reminded Dean, “But I’d never even met Ben.”

“I know,” Dean said. “I just, once I had some time to recover, and to think, I realized you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“So why didn’t you just come out and say that? Do you know the hate mail I still get? From your fans.” The last word came out trembling with rage.

“Because I was angry,” Dean said. “There’s nothing else to it but that. Anger. And resentment. That you came out okay.”

I laughed. All these people so sure I’d come out okay, and I only have myself to blame, for putting on the greatest show on earth. “Not really.”

Dean looked me up and down. It wasn’t a leer. He was simply making the most obvious observation. My casual, expensive clothes, my hair trimmed to $150 ends. “You look pretty okay.”

Dean’s legs slumped together in a V at the knees. I wondered if he set them like that every morning when he got out of bed. Another raindrop, more bulbous this time, docked at my forehead. “So why do we need privacy to say all this? Aaron said you wanted to set the record straight.”

“I do,” Dean said. “I’ll say all of this on camera. I’ll explain how I was confused and then too angry to rectify the situation. I’ll apologize and you’ll forgive me.”

I simmered. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Because you want to clear your name. And I can do that for you.”

“And what do you get out of it?”

“Ani”—Dean steepled his fingers—“I’ve made a very good fortune out of my bad fortune.”

Not far behind him was the black Mercedes, the driver in a spiffy suit waiting to chauffeur Dean to his next engagement. “You’re a true inspiration, Dean.”

“Hey”—he chuckled—“can you blame me for making the best out of it?”

The sun surfaced again. Found something like understanding and blasted it bright.