“Who are you?” I said finally.

“Friend of your father’s. He asked me to look out for you.”

“My father? How do you know my father? No, wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“What do you want me to do with this guy?”

“Let him go! What’s wrong with you?”

He did.

Rifkin straightened himself up. He had tears in his eyes. He looked at us with helpless impotence-apparently he still believed Jacob had killed his son, but he could not do anything about it-and he staggered off, to what torments I cannot imagine.

Father O’Leary went to Jacob and extended his hand. “Congratulations, kid. That was something in there this morning. Did you see the expression on that asshole DA’s face? Priceless!”

Jacob shook his hand with a bewildered expression.

“Helluva show,” Father O’Leary said. “Helluva show.” He laughed. “And you’re Billy Barber’s kid?”

“Yeah.” I had never been proud to say that. I’m not sure I had ever actually said it out loud in public before. But it gave me a connection to Father O’Leary and it seemed to amuse him, so we both smiled at it.

“You’re bigger than him, that’s for sure. You could fit two of that little shit inside a you.”

I did not know what to do with that comment so I just stood there.

“Tell your old man I said hello, all right?” Father O’Leary said. “Jesus, I could tell you stories about him.”

“Don’t. Please.”

Finally to Jacob: “It’s your lucky day, kid.” He laughed again and ambled away and I have never seen Father O’Leary again to this day.

Life goes on, probably too long if we’re being honest about it. In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest. We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories, as I am doing here. But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and “The End” is never the end.

The day Jacob was exonerated, of course, was a Big Day. But after it, remarkably, the little days just kept on coming.

We did not return to “normal”; we had, all three of us, forgotten what normal was. At least, we had no illusions that we would ever get back to it. But in the days and weeks after Jacob’s release, as the euphoria of our vindication receded, we did fall into a routine, if a barren one. We went out very little. Never to restaurants or other public places where we felt leered at. I took over the grocery shopping, since Laurie would not risk running into the Rifkins at the market again, and I picked up the wifely habit of planning the week’s dinner menus in my head as I shopped (pasta Monday, chicken Tuesday, hamburgers Wednesday…). We went to a few movies, usually midweek when the theaters were less crowded, and even then we made a point of slipping in just as the lights went down. Mostly we loafed around the house. We surfed the Web incessantly, entranced, glassy-eyed. We exercised on the treadmill in the basement rather than jog outside. We upped our Netflix plan so that we had as many DVDs on hand as possible. It sounds dismal, looking back on it, but at the time it felt wonderful. We were free, or something like it.

We considered moving-not to Buenos Aires, alas, but to more prosaic places where we might start again: Florida, California, Wyoming, anywhere we imagined people went to reinvent themselves. For a while I was preoccupied with the little town of Bisbee, Arizona, where I was told it is easy to get lost and stay lost. There was always the possibility of leaving the country too, which had a certain glamor. We got into interminable discussions about all this. Laurie doubted we could outrun the publicity the case had received, no matter how far we moved. Anyway, she said, her whole life was in Boston. For my part, I was eager to move somewhere else. I did not belong to any place to begin with; my home was wherever Laurie was. But I never was able to make much headway with her.

In Newton bad feelings lingered. Most of our neighbors had reached their own verdict: not guilty, but not exactly innocent either. Jacob may not have murdered Ben Rifkin, but they had heard enough to be disturbed by him. His knife, his violent fantasies, his wicked bloodline. To some, the abrupt end of the trial seemed fishy too. The kid’s continued presence in town worried and irritated people. Even the kind ones were not anxious to have Jacob in their children’s lives. Why take a chance? Even if they were ninety-nine percent sure of his innocence, who would risk being wrong when the stakes were so high? And who would risk the stigma of being seen with him? He was a pariah, whether he was actually guilty or not.

With all this, we did not dare send Jacob back to school in Newton. When he had first been indicted and promptly suspended from school, the town had been obliged to hire a home tutor for him, Mrs. McGowan, and we rehired her now to continue homeschooling him. Mrs. McGowan was the only regular visitor to our house, virtually the only one who ever saw the way we actually lived. When she walked in, a bit dowdy and heavy-hipped, her eyes would dance around, taking in the piles of dirty laundry, the unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, Jacob’s dirty hair. We must have seemed a little crazy to her. But she continued to show up every morning at nine to sit with Jacob at the kitchen table, reviewing his lessons, drubbing him for not doing his homework. “No one’s going to feel sorry for you,” she told him forthrightly. Laurie took an active part in Jacob’s lessons too. She was a remarkable teacher, I thought, patient, kind. I had never actually seen her teach before, but watching her work with Jacob, I thought: she should go back to teaching. She should have been doing it all along.

As the weeks went by, Jacob was quite content in his new solitary life. He was a natural hermit. He did not miss school or his friends, he said. In fact, homeschooling might have suited him best from the start. It gave him the best part of school, the “content” (his word), without the myriad complications of girls, sex, sports, bullies, peer pressure, cliques-the complication of other kids, basically. Jake was just happier alone. After what he’d been through, who could blame him? When we discussed moving, it was always Jacob who was most enthusiastically in favor. The farther, the remoter, the better. Bisbee, Arizona, would suit him fine, he thought. That was Jacob-that equanimity, that poise, half serene, half oblivious. It will sound weird, I know, but Jacob, who always had the most at stake in this case, never broke down and cried, never lost it. Sometimes he would get angry or sullen or introverted, occasionally self-pitying, as all kids do, but he never came apart. Now that the case was over, he was that same even-tempered kid. It was not hard to imagine why his classmates might find his eerie composure a little off-putting. Personally, I found it admirable.