“I assumed you would want me to,” I say.

“It’s up to you.”

“Do you not want me to come?”

“No, I do.”

“Then what is it?”

A long pause. “I don’t want to cook.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It won’t feel right if I don’t.”

“Mom,” I say, “you do not have to cook.” I adjust the grocery bag on my shoulder and hope she can’t hear the clanking bottles. “You know what we should do? Get some of that frozen fried chicken that comes in the blue box. We can just eat that. Remember how we used to have it every Friday night?”

She laughs. “I haven’t had that in years.”

I walk down Congress Street, past the bus depot, the statue of Longfellow staring down every passerby. I can hear the news playing in the background of the phone call: a pundit’s voice, then Trump’s.

Mom groans and the background noise is gone. “I mute him whenever he comes on.”

“I don’t understand how you can watch that all day.”

“I know, I know.”

My building comes into view. I’m about to wrap things up as she says, “You know, I saw your old school in the news the other day.”

I don’t stop walking, but I stop thinking, stop looking. I walk past my building, cross the next street and keep going. I hold my breath and wait to see if she’ll push further. She only said your old school, not that man.

“Well anyway,” she says with a sigh, “that place always was a hellhole.”

In the wake of the article about the other girls, Browick suspends Strane without pay and opens another investigation. This time the state police are involved, too. Or at least I think these things are true; they’re morsels I’ve picked up from Taylor’s Facebook posts and the comment section of the article, where pieces of seemingly legitimate information hide among rumors, rants, and hand-wringing. People screaming, IT’S SIMPLE, JUST CASTRATE ALL PEDOPHILES; others giving a more subdued benefit of the doubt, stuff like, Shouldn’t we all be innocent before proven guilty, let justice run its course, you can’t always trust these accusations, especially when they come from teenage girls with their vivid imaginations, their emotional unreliability. It’s head spinning and endless, and I don’t really know what’s going on because Strane hasn’t told me. My phone sits silent for days.

It takes all my self-control not to reach out. I write him texts, delete them, and write them again. I draft emails, bring up his number and poise my finger to call, but I won’t let myself. Despite the years of deferment, of allowing him to lecture me on what’s true, what’s puritanical hysteria, and what’s blatant lie, I do still have a grasp on reality. I haven’t been gaslighted into senselessness. I know I should be angry, and though that emotion sits on the other side of the canyon, far out of reach, I do my best to act as though I feel it. I sit and stay quiet, let my silence speak while I watch Taylor share the article again and again, captioning it with raised-fist emojis and words that read like nails in a coffin: Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.

When he does contact me, it’s an early-morning call, the phone ringing beneath my pillow, sending a vibration across the mattress that sounds in my dream like the drone of a motor on the lake, the rough muted hum I’d hear when swimming underwater as a speedboat passed. When I answer, I’m still in the dream, tasting lake water, watching the sunrays cut through the dark, all the way to the rotten leaves and fallen branches, all that endless muck.

On the phone, Strane exhales a shaky breath, the haggard kind you take after crying. “It’s all over,” he says. “But know that I loved you. Even if I was a monster, I did love you.” He’s outside. I hear wind, a wall of sound garbling his words.

Sitting up, I look to the window. It’s before sunrise, the sky a gradient of black to violet. “I’ve been waiting for you to call me.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I had to read about it in the newspaper. You could have told me.”

“I didn’t know it was coming,” he says. “I had no idea.”

“Who are these girls?”

“I don’t know. They’re just girls. They’re nobody. Vanessa, I don’t know what this is. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to have done.”

“They’re saying you molested them.”

He’s quiet, probably taken aback to hear the word come out of me. I’ve been gentle with him for so long.

“Tell me it’s not true,” I say. “Swear to me.” I listen to the white noise of the wind.

“You think it could be true,” he says. It isn’t a question but a realization, like he’s taken a step backward and can now see the doubt that’s begun to sidle up alongside the limits of my loyalty.

“What did you do to them?” I ask.

“What are you imagining? What do you think I’m capable of?”

“You did something. Why would they say this if you didn’t do anything?”

“It’s an epidemic,” he says. “There’s no logic to it.”

“But they’re just girls.” My voice cracks, a sob chokes out, and it feels like observing someone else cry, a woman playing the role of me. I remember my college roommate Bridget saying, after I first told her about Strane, Your life is like a movie. She didn’t understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn’t agree to. She meant it as a compliment. Isn’t that what all teenage girls want? Endlessly bored, aching for an audience.

Strane tells me not to try to make sense of this, that it’ll drive me crazy. “What is this?” I ask. “What is it?” I need a scene to slip into, a description of where they were in the classroom, behind his desk or at the seminar table, what the light looked like, what hand he used, but I’m crying too hard and he’s telling me to listen, to please stop crying and listen to him.

He says, “It wasn’t the same with them, do you understand? It wasn’t like how it was with you. I loved you, Vanessa. I loved you.”

When he hangs up, I know what’s next. I remember the threat I made to Ira when, exasperated with my inertia, he’d said he was going to report Strane himself. “Ira, if you do that,” I said, my voice steady and cold, “if you tell anyone anything about him, you will never see me again. I’ll disappear.”

Staring at the phone, I tell myself the urge to call 911 is irrational, unwarranted, but really I’m scared. I don’t know how to explain any of this—who I am, who he is—without giving away the whole story. I tell myself it wouldn’t help, that I don’t even know where he is—outside, someplace windy. This isn’t enough to go on. Then I see a text from him, sent just before the call. You can do whatever you want, he wrote. If you want to tell, you should.

I type a response, my fingers flying across the screen: I don’t want to tell. I never will. I watch the message deliver and then sit unread.

I fall back asleep, first fitful and then deep like the dead, and I don’t wake up until quarter past eleven, when they’ve already dragged the river for his body. By five p.m., the Portland newspaper posts an article.

The article includes a photo from a recent school picture day, Strane sitting before a blue background, wearing a tie I recognize and even remember the feel of—navy with little embroidered diamonds. He looks so old, hair thin and gray, face clean-shaven and sallow, all loose neck and hooded eyes. He looks small. Not small like a boy, but like an old man, brittle and worn down. He doesn’t look straight at the camera but somewhere off to the left, with a puzzled expression, mouth slightly open. He looks confused, like he doesn’t fully comprehend what has happened or what he’s done.

The next day, a box arrives in the mail postmarked the day before he jumped from the bridge. Inside I find Polaroids, letters, cards, and photocopies of essays I wrote for his class, everything resting on a bed of yellowed cotton—the strawberry pajamas he bought for me the first time we slept together. There’s no note, but I need no explanation. It’s all the evidence, every last bit he had.

The story spreads across the state. Local TV news runs a segment with quick shots of the Browick campus, students walking on pathways shaded by pine trees, white clapboard dorms, the administration building with its columned facade. There’s a lingering shot of the humanities building. Then the same photo of Strane and, beneath it, his misspelled name: jacob strain.

Time disappears as I scroll through comment sections, Facebook posts, Twitter threads, my phone dinging every so often from the Google Alert I’ve set for his name. On my laptop, I keep fifteen tabs open at a time, jumping from one to the other, and when I’ve caught up on all the comments, I watch the news clip. The first time I watched it, I had to run to the bathroom and throw up, but I’ve forced myself to sit through it so many times, I turn numb to it. No reaction when Strane’s photo flashes on-screen. When the newscaster says “allegations from five different students,” I don’t even flinch.