She pulled at a strand of her hair. "I can't accept it." Her voice was hoarse now, her eyes distant. "Nothing seems real anymore, you know?" She gestured around the tiny airless room. "This place. I feel like I'm sleepwalking in a nightmare… I want to wake up… I want Matt back…" She swallowed, seemed almost to gulp at the air. "God, I don't know. What can you do? What do you care?"

"I do care, Mrs. Witt."

She took that in without a blink, not a sigh, not a glance at him. Inside herself again.

Hardy looked down at his hands, linked on the table between them. Jennifer Witt wasn't worried about her lawyers and their games, about her bail and her baggy yellow jumpsuit. She'd lost her son and nobody was going to bring him back. She was right. Nothing Hardy could do would make that better.

*****

There was a square of light from an outside window over one of the guard's desks. It had moved nearly a foot since Jennifer had been brought in.

She had begun to open up, to listen. The details of Hardy's proxy representation accepted for the moment, they were finally getting down to it. She didn't want to spend the rest of her life in jail, did she?

"Not for something I didn't do, Mr. Hardy."

"Okay. But let me ask you, what did you mean when you said you deserved it? Deserved what? "

In a reaction that struck Hardy as pathetic, she ducked away, as if she were going to be hit. "Nothing, anything… this…"

"What?"

"I shouldn't have let it happen. I wasn't there. Maybe if I'd been there…" She shook her head again.

"What did happen? Why do the police think you did this?" Hardy wanted to hear her version. Never imagining he'd have any part in it, he'd followed the news of the crime casually as it appeared in the papers or on television, just another of the many stories of domestic woe that came and went to help sell soap or hamburgers or newspapers.