My heart is pounding the way it does on the all-too-rare occasions when I run for exercise. I’m sitting in front of the St. Stephen’s Preparatory School with one of the most distinguished alumni who ever attended it, and he’s telling me he was screwing a high school student. A student who is now dead. This man is my lifelong friend, yet the first words that pass my lips are not those of a friend but of a lawyer. “Tell me she was eighteen, Drew.”

“Her birthday was in two weeks.”

I suck in my breath and close my eyes. “It might as well have been two years. That’s statutory rape in Mississippi. Especially with the age difference between you. It’s what, twenty years?”

“Almost twenty-three.”

I shake my head in disbelief.

He takes my arm and pulls it toward him, forcing me to look into his eyes. “I’m not crazy, Penn. I know you think I’ve lost my mind, but I loved that girl like no one I’ve known in my life.”

I look away, focusing on the playground of the middle school, where water has pooled on the merry-go-round. What to say? This isn’t a case of some horny assistant coach who got too chummy with a cheerleader in the locker room. This is an educated and successful man in the grip of a full-blown delusion.

“Drew, I prosecuted a lot of child molesters in Houston. I remember one who had regularly molested an eleven-year-old girl. Can you guess what his defense was?”

“What?”

“They were in love.”

He snorts with disdain. “You know this isn’t like that.”

“Do I? Jesus Christ, man.”

“Penn…until you’re in a situation like this, you simply can’t understand it. I was the first to condemn that coach who got involved with that senior over at the public school. I couldn’t fathom it then. But now…I see it from the inside.”