He'd never felt crazy, Reggie thought. But he must have been. At least, if he'd really done what everyone said he'd done. You'd have to be crazy to do that. To go up to a complete stranger on the street and hurt her like that. When he heard the details, he actually got sick. Look, he said to the lawyers, I couldn't have done it. It made me sick to my stomach just hearing about it. But the lawyers insisted he did do it and everyone else seemed to agree.

Christ.

He could never have done such a thing. Pick up an empty beer bottle on the street? That alone, with all the germs, was disgusting enough. Really. He would never do that, much less the other stuff. Much less hold the bottle in his hand and break it, smash it so it was all jagged and sharp and deadly. And then go up to a stranger in the street, a total stranger, and… and…

He couldn't even think about it. It was too awful. Too sick.

Too crazy.

She needed three hundred stitches, they said in court. And she lost an eye.

How could he have done such a thing?

He couldn't, that's how.

It was all the lawyers' fault. They made everyone believe he was guilty. No, not that, worse than guilty. Crazy. His own lawyer! Telling the whole world he was as cuckoo as a loon! And then smiling afterward, telling him how happy he should be because they weren't putting him in prison, they were putting him in a place for loons. A special hospital for nut jobs.

God, he hated fucking lawyers. Hated them the whole time he was in the loony bin. Seven years of hate. And getting out hadn't changed anything. It had been thirty days since they told him he wasn't crazy anymore. Thirty days since he'd been back on the streets. He'd hated them every one of those days, too. Every single minute of every single day for thirty days…