“Drew, you’ve thrown your life away. Do you realize that? You could go to jail for twenty years. I can’t even…” My voice fails, because it suddenly strikes me that I may not have heard the worst of what will be revealed in this car tonight. “You didn’t kill her, did you?”

The blood drains from his face. “Are you out of your mind?”

“What did you expect me to ask?”

“Not that. And there’s something pretty damned cold in your tone.”

“If you don’t like my tone, wait till you hear the district attorney. You and Kate Townsend? Holy shit. ”

“I didn’t kill her, Penn.”

I take another deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, of course not. Do you think she committed suicide?”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because we were planning to leave together. Kate was excited about it. Not depressed at all.”

“You were planning to run away together?”

“Not run away. But to be together, yes.”

“She was a kid, Drew.”

“In some ways. Not many. Kate had a different kind of upbringing. She went through a lot, and she learned a lot from it. She was very mature for her age, both psychologically and emotionally. And that’s saying something these days. These kids aren’t like we were, Penn. You have no idea. By fifteen they’ve gone through things you and I didn’t experience until our twenties. Some of them are jaded by eighteen.”

“That doesn’t mean they understand what they’re doing. But I’ll be sure and run that argument past the jury.”

Drew’s eyes flicker. “Are you saying you’ll represent me?”

“I was joking. Who else knows about this relationship?”

“No one.”

“Don’t be stupid. Someone always knows.”

He sets his jaw and shakes his head with confidence. “You didn’t know Kate. Nobody knows about us.”

The naïveté of human beings is truly breathtaking. “Whatever you say.”

Drew puts his big hands on the wheel and squeezes it like a man doing isometric exercises. In the small space of the car, his size is intimidating. I’m six-foot-one, two hundred pounds; Drew has two inches and twenty pounds of muscle on me, and he hasn’t let himself slip much from the days he played tight end for Vanderbilt. It’s not hard to imagine Kate Townsend being attracted to him.