Ronnie stared across the parking lot, straight at where Alice was sitting. But Alice didn’t panic or try to run away. People couldn’t see what they weren’t looking for. She had the advantage of knowing that Ronnie worked here. But Ronnie had no expectation of seeing Alice on the edge of the Westview Mall parking lot. It was almost as good as being invisible.

The aproned girl said something and Ronnie appeared to laugh. She hunched up her shoulders and bobbed her head, looking as if she was enjoying herself. She dragged hard on her cigarette, throwing back her head on the exhales. When had she learned to smoke? You couldn’t smoke at any of the places Alice had been. Not even adult prisoners were allowed to smoke these days. Had Ronnie smoked when they were little? Alice had no memory of it. But she had always suspected that Ronnie knew all sorts of things she didn’t tell. That was what Alice had been trying to get the grown-ups to understand back then: Ronnie had secrets. Ronnie knew things she wasn’t supposed to know, which was what made her so dangerous.

Ronnie took the cigarette from her mouth and dropped it into a low ceramic pot, what Helen called a “butt beach,” one of those little containers of sand outside restaurants and movie theaters. Helen hated these fixtures, not because she objected to smoking, but because they were always ugly and cheap looking. The butts sticking up in sand, some with lipstick-smeared ends, made Helen shudder.

Now Alice shuddered, too. But it wasn’t the cement basin that bothered Alice, it was seeing Ronnie use it. The very neatness, the orderliness of this act was disorienting. It was natural for Ronnie to smoke. But once her break was over, she should have flicked her butt into the air in a careless arc and let it fall where it may. Ronnie was the kind of girl who littered, dropping candy wrappers and soda cans in the gutter. At least she had been. Ronnie was the bad one. There shouldn’t be any confusion about this, even now. Especially now.

Her latest attempt at chocolate-covered peanuts, forgotten while she was watching Ronnie, had melted to mush in the brown paper sack in her hand. It was just as well. They weren’t going to taste like the old ones. Nothing did. Strange, when she tried to stand, her breath caught in her throat and her lungs seemed to slam shut, as if she were the one who was drowning.

Daniel Kutchner eased himself out of Sharon Kerpelman with the sweet-but-sheepish air of a man who had just had sex with someone he might never see again. Sharon didn’t mind. She had made a similar decision about Daniel before they ended up in bed, but the evening had a little momentum going for it. At least she would be able to tell her mother with a clear conscience that she’d really tried. She would not be explicit, of course, telling her mother that she and Evelyn Kutchner’s son had-what was the hideous phrase she had heard a twenty-something toss off the other day-landed the deal. But her mother would figure it out, and appreciate the codes that Sharon used to convey such information. Nice enough. No real chemistry.

“Bathroom?” he asked.

“The first door on your right, when you go out in the hallway,” she said. Was he a washer, she wondered. Or did he just need to pee? Both, as it turned out. She listened as one stream of water followed another. She rather liked his fastidiousness.

So what was wrong with Daniel Kutchner? Some women, aware that they had dated their way into an instantaneous dead end, might have turned the question on themselves, but Sharon never would. She got up, comfortable enough in her skin so that she didn’t feel the need to put on a robe or T-shirt, and headed out into the hall, knocking on the bathroom door as she passed by.

“Do you want anything? I’m going to fix myself a drink.”

This interrupted the third stream of water-probably from the faucet. Daniel Kutchner must be washing his hands now.

“You mean, like a glass of water, or a soda?”

“I have those, too,” Sharon said. “But I was thinking of a drink-drink, truthfully. I like to have a glass of white wine, or Bailey’s on the rocks before I go to sleep. I’ve got a full bar.”

“How not-Jewish,” Kutchner said through the door and they both laughed, for it was the theme of the evening, the pleasant bond they had established over dinner, making a list of what was Jewish and what was not. “Okay. Sure. Whatever you’re having.”

Sharon wandered through her apartment, which would have surprised her coworkers if they had ever been invited to see it. Her apartment was the only clue to Sharon ’s secret: She could afford to work at the public defender’s office because there was family money. Not a lot, but enough to close the gap between the barely middle-class lifestyle afforded by a government wage and the upper-middle-class life to which she was accustomed. That’s why it was nice, bringing home someone like Daniel, who knew about the Kerpel-mans and the small foundations company that had made everyone permanently comfortable when it began catering to postop breast cancer patients.

She returned to the bedroom with two old-fashioned glasses, aluminum Russell Wright knockoffs, on a matching tray, and set them on the bedside table.

“How civilized,” Daniel said, coming back into the room. He was skinny and on the short side, and his hairline would probably start receding soon. But those things didn’t matter to Sharon. The real problem with Daniel Kutchner was that her mother had picked him out for her, as his mother had picked Sharon out for him, and this could not be overcome.

He sat on the side of the bed, as if he hadn’t decided whether to sleep or flee. Sharon didn’t care if he left eventually. The only thing she asked of her intermittent lovers was that they talk to her afterward. Hence, the ritual of the drink. If she had smoked, that would have worked, too. But she didn’t, and so few people did now. But confronted with an offer of a drink, few men could insist on going to sleep, or running out the door.

Daniel set his glass back down, knocking over a small wooden frame. As he righted it, he peered at the face in the photograph, just visible in the available light coming from the bathroom.

“Who’s this? Not you with these pigtails.”

“No, I was never a blond, that’s for sure.”

“Niece?”

“Client.”

The photo was one of Alice, an old snapshot that Helen Manning had given Sharon for reasons she could no longer recall. She only knew it was a “before” photo of sorts, a picture of Alice from earlier in the summer of her eleventh year. A snapshot of a perfectly normal-looking little girl. Which was the point, of course, the thing that Sharon had never wanted anyone to forget.

“Client? Why do you have a photo of a client by your bedside?”

“Because it was probably the most amazing case I’ll ever be involved with.” She had meant to be a little hyperbolic, but realized the words, once spoken, were the simple truth. “You’re from Baltimore, right?”

“Originally.”

“Seven years ago-I’m not sure if it was in newspapers outside the area-two little girls were accused of killing a baby.”

“And that girl is-”

“One of the accused. Even now, even here, I wouldn’t say her name to you. It’s privileged. We kept their names private, which was no small thing, let me tell you.”

“So they weren’t tried as adults?”

“They were eleven!” Sharon ’s voice rose automatically, and she had to remember to yank it back down to a tone better suited to a postcoital chat. “There was no provision in Maryland law to try children that young as adults. Not that the parents of the victim didn’t push for that. And then, when it was clear the family wouldn’t get its way, the victim’s mother threatened to lobby to have the law changed, so homicides could be moved into adult court no matter what the age of the accused.”