Ted noticed the tall, burly police chief, dressed in a business suit and seated in the gallery. Far from intimidating the lawyer, his presence made Ted even more determined to nail him and his department to the wall. Ted knew that Baedes was interested in the case. Baedes was even involved, Ted knew, because he was on the prosecution’s witness list. Ted wanted to nail him to the wall, because Ted hated to lose. Even more than that, beyond even Baedes’s extreme approach to law enforcement—and the fact that he was biologically incapable of admitting that he’d ever been wrong—Baedes was after Ted and Mira, personally, and Ted knew that he had taken some of his fear and frustration out on Ted’s clients. Questions, threats, lies, all without counsel present. Damian hadn’t told him anything, because Damian hadn’t known anything, because there wasn’t anything to know. That seemed just to make Baedes more upset, more angry.
Ted hated to lose, but he hated even more to be bullied.
As Damian put it, “You didn’t know which was worse: the man in the blue uniform, or the man in the brown jacket.”
“That’s easy,” Ted said. “The blue uniform didn’t actually hit you, did he.”
“Yeah, but I thought he was going to.”
As for Damian Alvarez, it normally made sense that he would fight tooth and nail over such a minor charge. True, if he pled guilty, nothing would likely happen to him, except for a fine that he was more than able to pay. But there were a host of so-called collateral punishments he could be subjected to. Even a trivial offense like possession, if he were convicted, might mean he couldn’t adopt a child, might cost him business clients, could interfere with his getting a job, if he needed to.
It would also mean he couldn’t own a firearm. And ever since the man in the brown jacket threatened Damian, Jay insisted he keep a gun in the office, just in case. Because these competitors, they were militant, they were dangerous, and—mob ties or no—they were crazy. And with all the evidence of that assault, the cops still had not yet identified the man in the brown leather jacket. Damian had gotten a call from the investigator on the case, a Harris Kemp, who had asked him a bunch of questions. And that was the last Damian had heard. One more reason for Ted to nail Baedes to the wall.
Whatever other reasons for following his defense through to the end, Damian was determined to see it through, and he had the money and means to fight. And the case could be great publicity for the Committee. Michael would no doubt see to that. Ted wasn’t sure that his client was strictly innocent. But he thought there was a chance he could get Damian off. So Ted took his client’s lead. He argued tooth and nail.
And he was winning.
Truthfully, the prosecution had flubbed their case. The prosecutor was a newbie. They probably threw him on this case as an easy win, something to break his teeth in on. As a result, he didn’t do his homework. The evidence was suspect. And he made numerous mistakes in his execution.
The other officer at the scene, a Pamela Burns—whom Ted had previously had dealings with—testified for the prosecution. She confirmed Dietrich’s story. And the prosecutor added some stuff in about how she and Dietrich had always been honest, disciplined, and only in search of the truth. But Ted got her to admit that she had not noticed the evidence at first. It was only after the other officer had pointed it out to her that she noticed it.
Then he asked her, “You have a degree in Criminal Justice.”
“Objection,” said the prosecutor.
Ted stared quizzically at him. The judge must have been, too, because he added, “Irrelevant.”
Ted responded, “Judge, I have the right to question this witness.”
“Agreed,” said the judge. “Overruled.” And then he looked at the prosecuting attorney and said, “Please try to be more selective with your objections.”
Ted repeated himself, “You have a degree in Criminal Justice.”
“Yes,” she replied.
“In fact, you have a master’s degree.”
“Yes.”
“And you attained this degree while working for the Boston police department.”
“Yes, I attended Boston University while employed at the Boston police department, under the PCIPP.”
“The PCIPP is an incentive program,” Ted said.
“Right, the way it works is—“
“That’s okay, we don’t need to know that. But we would like to know, did you like working in Boston?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why did you move to Abe’s Turn?”
“It’s a smaller department, a chance for career advancement.”
“But Boston still has a good police force.”
“Yes, absolutely!” she said.
The prosecutor apparently couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. “Your honor, what does this have to do with anything?”
“I’ll allow the question,” the judge said, “but move it along.”
Ted continued. “You worked there for how many years?”
“Three,” Pam said.
“While you were working in Boston, did you ever encounter anyone using marijuana?”
“Yes.”
“In fact, you encountered many who had small amounts of marijuana in their possession.”
“Yes,” she confirmed again.
“Out of the many people you encountered with this amount of the drug,” and Ted held up the baggie, “how many did you arrest?”
Pam hesitated, and she looked at the chief, who had glued his gaze on her from the gallery. “I don’t recall,” she said.
“Well, I dug through the arrest records in Boston in order to find out the answer. Care to guess what number I came up with?”
“No,” she said, to chuckles from the jury and gallery.
“Would you believe three?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Only a few arrests. Did you just ignore most of the offenders?”
“No,” she protested. “Most of the time, we found more than that, and we did arrest them. But sometimes with trivial cases, we just confiscated the contraband and let them off with a warning, because it wasn’t worth all the trouble of prosecuting them all. If we had to arrest every pot smoker in the city, we wouldn’t be able to fight more serious crimes.”
“You wouldn’t be able to fight more serious crimes.” Ted grinned.
“Uh—”
“So why did you and Officer Dietrich take the time and effort to file an arrest in this case?”
“Objection,” said the prosecutor. “He’s putting the law on trial.”
“Not with that question, I’m not,” Ted interjected. “I have a right to impeach this witness.”
The judge agreed. “He has the right to question the integrity of the prosecutorial witnesses. Objection overruled.”
Pam said nothing. She stared at Baedes again, who was resting his face in his hands.
“Who told you to arrest Damian Alvarez?” Ted glared at her and added, “Remember that you’re under oath.”
Pam still said nothing.
The judge said, “Answer the question.”
“We were ordered to,” Pam squeaked.
A murmur rippled through the room. Ted strutted back to his seat, as if that was the answer he had expected, and he did not try to push any further. In reality, he had taken a chance on that last question, because he didn’t really know the answer. And the first rule of cross-examination is never to ask a question unless you can already prove what the correct answer is. She could have lied outright, and there wouldn’t have been anything Ted could have done to contradict her. She could have said that they they had simply chosen to arrest Damian Alvarez, on a whim. But Ted had led up to his finale with strong questions. And when the time came, it looked like he knew more than he actually did. He got more than he had bargained for.
The prosecutor called Baedes to the stand. He established the chief as a law enforcement expert and basically allowed him to make a speech, while asking him questions.
Baedes said, “People don’t realize that marijuana is the number one drug that sends teenagers to emergency rooms today. That shocks people. They think pot is some sort of a safe drug, but it isn’t. It’s the number two cause of car crashes. It’s a much worse drug than people know.
“Maybe they were ordered to arrest Damian Alvarez. So what? The standing order in Abe’s Turn is to arrest all drug criminals, all the time.
“That’s just tough love, which is not a bad way to go. It’s done a lot to make us safer. Since the War on Drugs, we’ve significantly reduced drug use in the United States. Teenage drug use is way down. And crime is way down. We have a record low crime rate in Abe’s Turn, and one of the reasons we do is that we’ve taken a lot of the slime off the streets and put them into prison. I’m glad that our cops are tough on drugs.
“The reason crime has gone down is very simple, more people are in jail for longer periods of time. If we didn’t prosecute these crimes, everybody would start using it, because there wouldn’t be any penalty to it. They’d start thinking, I’ll go drive my car high on this or that. Imagine your brain surgeon toking up before your operation. Oh, that would be good for you, wouldn’t it? These drugs are not good for you. Fortunately, it’s against the law.
“By the way,” he added, “it’s against the law in Boston, too.”
Meanwhile, Damian sat looking innocent, his wife and kids staring angrily behind him. On cross-examination, Ted pointed out that studies show drug use is up, not down. He challenged the chief’s crazy scenarios, like a brain surgeon toking up before an operation. (Is that why brain surgeons operate drunk? Because alcohol is legal?) Ted also cited statistics that show that Baedes’s toking brain surgeon probably would not have gotten caught anyhow, at least not under the drug laws, no matter what the law said and no matter what the police did.
The prosecution had done most of the hard work for Ted. They had all but given the jury a reason to acquit, by letting Ted impeach every single one of their witnesses. Ted additionally had witnesses who would testify that Dietrich was crooked. All that was left was to make Damian likable enough to make the jury want to acquit. And that, Ted was sure, Damian’s wife and brother would accomplish.
The prosecution rested its case. Court broke for lunch. As Ted as Michael walked down the hallway, they encountered Baedes and Dietrich chatting. Baedes suddenly stopped talking and glared at Ted.
“I guess you’re pretty upset about my winning this case, huh, Sam?” Ted said.
Baedes’s face betrayed his agitation, even to Ted. “You shouldn’t have gotten involved.”
This perplexed Ted, and he formed his face into a mock pout. “Not get involved? With my own client?”
“He wasn’t your client before we arrested him.”
“Bull. You don’t know that.”
“I do know that your client would have been better off without you.”
“That almost sounds like a threat.” Ted smiled, taunting the chief. But inside, he was concerned.
“Just a statement of fact,” Baedes replied. “You appreciate facts, don’t you? Like the fact that you just attacked two fine officers in there. And all to get a druggie off the hook.”
“Yeah, well, you have no proof, and fortunately, in this country, we have a little thing called reasonable doubt. It protects the rights of the innocent.”
“You mean, the guilty,” Baedes growled.
“Fortunately, the jury sees things differently.”
“You think so.”
“Yes,” Ted replied. “I think so. Otherwise…” Ted lowered his voice and grinned. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be so upset.”
Baedes’s face turned red, and he underscored his words with stabs of his finger. “I hope you realize who you’re helping. That’s a druggie and a bully. He’s crossed the wrong people. And that puts you in as much danger as him.”
Ted chuckled and his eyebrows moved as he talked. “I think I’ll manage,” he said.
In reality, Ted thought that last comment felt like a threat, and it worried him.
He suddenly noticed that Michael had been standing quietly and listening, wearing a scowl.
Baedes breathed deeply. “I’m just saying.”
Clyde was planning Christmas dinner when she heard a knock at the front door. She opened it, revealing Michael’s big, round, blue-flashlight eyes staring at her with a strange look on them, a look she couldn’t identify.
“Hey, you,” she said sweetly. Then she considered for a moment. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Clyde said, and she showed him into the living room. “Is Ted alright?”
“Oh, yes,” Michael said comfortingly. “They’re waiting for the jury. He doesn’t expect to be too late, because he’s sure the jurors have weekend plans.” He paused for Clyde to giggle. “He suggested the three of us eat out tonight.”
“Sure, I guess so,” she said. “Yeah, I think going out would be fun. Do you know if Mira has any plans?”
Clyde cringed as soon as the words came out of her mouth. She shouldn’t be asking Michael whether Mira has plans, because he wouldn’t know. And she didn’t even know how he might feel about the four of them going out together socially. They hadn’t gone out as a group in a long time. What’s more, Clyde knew how Michael felt about Mira, and she knew that Mira did not return his feelings. Michael acted as though it didn’t matter to him, and they had been able to keep their relationship professional. But to Clyde, the two had both seemed to be distant, for a long time now, as if they were just shells of their former selves. Clyde missed Michael’s witty repartee, of which she saw much less. Somehow, he seemed too serious and businesslike to be Michael. And Clyde missed connecting with Mira, which was as much Clyde’s fault as it was Mira’s. Clyde had already decided not to share her secret, not even with her closest friend. And the only person who knew her secret, Jane, seemed to be avoiding her calls. That worried Clyde in itself. But the thing that bothered her most was that she had no one to talk to about what she knew, and that there was very little she could do to help. She couldn’t even tell her beloved, her husband. All she could do was to gently suggest to him that he could consider using her so-called crazy theory to nourish that seed of reasonable doubt in the minds of Damian Alvarez’s jurors.
Michael didn’t seem to notice Clyde’s mention of Mira. “I wouldn’t know,” he simply said. He seemed to be thinking about something else.
“Oh,” Clyde said, relieved. Then she cautiously proffered, “Do you mind if I give her a call?”
“Sure, go right ahead.” Then he came back to life. “Hey, we haven’t gone out for a long time. The last time we got together socially was, what? Thanksgiving?”
“That was social?” Clyde joked. “That was painful,” she said.
“The food was good!” Michael said.
“Oh would I that the food could have saved the day.”
Michael sighed and looked at her tenderly. “Hey, don’t feel bad. It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have been so wrapped up in myself. I’m sorry.”
Clyde was genuinely surprised. “Wha— It wasn’t your fault. We were all upset about something.” Then she added, “The problem is that we weren’t talking about what we were upset about.” She hardly believed those words had come out of her mouth, and she didn’t really know why she had said them.
“Well, I think we talk just fine. But…”
Michael’s words trailed off mid-sentence. He seemed to be solving a deep problem in his mind. This was something Michael almost never did. Michael was always talking, always listening, always observing, always doing. He seemed to just know what he wanted to do, and he rarely planned anything, much less thought about it.
“What is it?” Clyde asked.
Michael thought for a moment longer, as if he were formulating his next words, very much unlike Michael.
“How did you know?” he said.
“How did I know… what?”
“How did you know that Baedes has a thing against Jay and Damian, because he thinks they’re the top dogs? And how did you know that he wants to take them down a notch? And how did you know that he was the one who orchestrated the trumped-up drug bust, with the sole purpose of damaging Damian’s reputation and his business?”
Clyde immediately went into fight-or-flight mode. She didn’t even think about it. Danger, her mind thought. Must lie.
“I didn’t know,” she said, “not for sure. That was just a crazy theory. Ted’s just playing lawyer games, that’s all.”
“You’re lying,” Michael said. “That was too specific to be just a lucky guess. And this has nothing to do with Ted.”
“What’s your damage, Michael?” Clyde looked at him as though she thought he was crazy.
“Firstly, I can tell you’re lying, because I can see it in your eyes.”
“What, are you a mind-reader now?” Clyde retorted. She didn’t care now whether he was upset by her brusqueness. In fact, she would have preferred him to become upset, because maybe it would distract him and get him off track.
Michael ignored her. “Secondly, I overheard Beady-eyes himself discussing the matter with one of his ego-inflated minions.”
“Oh.” Clyde nodded.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t seem surprised that your ‘crazy theory’ is actually correct.” He used air quotes around the words “crazy theory.”
He continued. “See, now, I haven’t told anyone about this, not even Ted. I know the truth, because I happened to be in the right place at the right time—and because Beady-eyes is an idiot… But that’s another subject altogether.
“What confuses me is, how did you know the truth, and before anyone else did?”
Clyde squinted her eyes and shook her head. “I didn’t know. I just guessed. It was just a crazy guess, a crazy theory. A fluke. That’s all. It was just a fluke that I happened to be right. I can’t explain it. These things happen sometimes, you know?”
Michael paused a moment, and he nodded. “Okay. You don’t feel you can tell me. That’s okay. Maybe you don’t feel I can be trusted to keep your secret. But just think about this: I haven’t told anyone what I know. And I’m not going to tell. Because this is big, Clydene. And if you knew something, I know how we could have done something about it. But not if you don’t trust me.”
Clyde pshawed at him. “What could you have done?”
“I know people,” he simply replied.
Clyde just stared at him, not knowing what to think, not knowing how to feel, not knowing how to respond.
Her voice cracked as she said, “I’d better call Mira.”
Michael nodded, and Clyde picked up the phone from the living room coffee table. She was about to dial, when Michael said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but…”
Clyde waited a moment before she said, “But what?”
Michael continued. “You should know something.”
She hung up the phone receiver. Her impatience grew.
“Ted and I ran into Baedes at the courthouse.” Michael looked worried.
Clyde’s imagination ran wild. Was Ted okay? Was their marriage still okay? Was Ted going to yell at her? Was he going to have her arrested? Or was he going to come home with bad news that would change their lives forever? Or even worse, would he come home and say nothing about it, while their relationship changed from under her?
Michael still did not continue.
“Well,” Clyde said, “you can’t just leave me hanging!”
Michael chuckled. “I guess not.” He became somber again. “But it’s not good news. And I don’t think Ted realizes it’s serious. But I’m beginning to think it is serious.”
Clyde glued her eyes to Michael’s.
“We ran into Beady-eyes at the courthouse, and he threatened Ted.”
Clyde was nonplussed. She was not aware of any plan Baedes had against her husband, other than to bully Ted’s clients more than he bullied anyone else.
“What did he say he was going to do?” Clyde asked.
“He didn’t say. He didn’t make any direct threat, nothing that would stand up in court, even if we could prove that he actually said it. But I took it as a threat, against Ted and against Jay and Damian. Beady-eyes is looking for revenge. To him, it’s personal.”
In her mind, Clyde scanned through the facts she knew. Beady-eyes knew who the thug was who had assaulted Damian. He knew that this thug was associated with WBH, and with organized crime, because the thug had told him so. But he let the thug go free, because in his view, J&D were even worse. And he believed in fighting fire with fire, as long as he could get away with it. Yes, that sounds like it could be a personal crusade. And the level of harassment they’d already received did not yet accomplish their enemies’ goals.
She looked back at Michael’s face.
Quietly, he said, “What should I do?”
“Jay and Damian should go on vacation. Or failing that, they should step up security at their offices. It’s likely that they may get another visit from their friendly neighborhood goons.”
“I see,” Michael said.
Clyde continued. “And don’t expect any help from the police in assisting you, or in catching the creeps who have been terrorizing them. The cops could be parked across the street, and you couldn’t pull them away from their donuts.”
Michael chortled, but his teeth appeared to be clenched.
“In fact, the only reason they wouldn’t join in the terrorizing is because they don’t want to get their hands dirty.” Then she corrected herself. “Baedes doesn’t want to get his hands dirty.”
Michael seemed to contemplate this for a moment. “Fuck,” he whispered.
Clyde considered for a moment whether she should say more. After all, everything she had said could be chalked up to mere theory and coincidence. But it was some coincidence, because it would all turn out to be true.
“I know the name of the head thug,” she said.
Michael looked surprised to hear this. But he said nothing.
“One more thing,” Clyde said.
“What’s that?”
“We didn’t have this conversation.”
Without missing a beat, and dead serious, Michael said, “You mean about inviting Mira to dinner tonight? Why not? Because that’s the only conversation I remember having.”
Clyde hammered the point home. “I mean it,” she said. “You can’t even talk to Ted— especially not Ted. He wouldn’t understand.” She felt sick to her stomach.
“One of the rules,” Michael explained, “is that I don’t tell you who I talk to. And you don’t tell me. And I don’t tell anyone that I talked to you, and you don’t tell anyone that you talked to me.”
He continued, “I’ll make sure Jay and Damian get the help they need.”
Jay Alvarez returned home with his wife and kids, returned home from his brother’s victory dinner—it appears the jury believed either in official corruption or in jury nullification—to find the house lights on and a strange car just barely visible in the dark of the driveway.
Mrs. Alvarez gawked at the scene and said, “Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Jay said, as he drove right by.
He hadn’t told the rest of the family about Michael’s call. Michael had poured out his heart-felt congratulations to them. As always, Jay could tell he was sincere, even over the phone. But Michael had sounded disturbed, fearful, in what he said next. He suggested Jay and Damian get in touch with a private investigator friend of his, “to keep those creeps from harassing you any more.” Michael said he had already briefly discussed the situation with his friend the private-eye, who went by the unlikely name of “Samson.”
Now, Jay turned his car down a side street opposite the house, and pulled over to the side of the road. He could still see his home behind him. There was activity within, which he could discern from the moving shadow on the window shades, but he couldn’t tell what it was. He pulled from his breast pocket the scrap of paper he had scrawled on: “Samson, Private Investigator,” followed by 10 digits in groups of 3, 3, and 4, each separated by dashes.
Screw this, he thought. He told his wife to stay in the car with the kids, and to call the police and tell them their house was being robbed. Jay sneaked across the street and around to the basement entrance. Inside, he could hear above him heavy steps, interspersed with the loud crashes of destruction. He pulled his safe out from under the basement steps, fumbled with his keys for a moment in the dark before he found the right one, unlocked the box, flipped it open, dug under papers and removed a semi-automatic pistol and magazine, loaded the magazine into the pistol, cocked the loading mechanism.
He breathed in the cold, dry air and carefully ascended the staircase. With each step, he feared a rattle or creak that might betray his approach. But the stairs did not creak, and he had no reason to fear giving up the advantage of surprise. The feeble sounds of his careful footfalls simply could not match the booms of the demolition of his personal property, the violation of his home, the invasion of his sacred castle.
Now at the top step, he listened. He needn’t have done so. He had been listening with each step on each stair. The wrecking had clearly finished in the living room to his right and had moved into his den, on the left. This was perfect.
Jay carefully turned the handle and nudged the door open a fraction of an inch. Then grasping his gun with both hands, at the ready, he pushed open the door. He pointed the gun at his attacker, whom he immediately recognized, whom he had half expected to be there.
Jay stood in the over-sized hallway, from a vantage point that allowed him to see most of the den. Half the room was in shambles, knickknacks shattered, furniture in pieces, his home theater system partially dismantled, and not the proper way. Jay stared down his brother’s attacker, a large, muscular man in brown leather, from the safe end of the barrel of his .45, just as he had done weeks before.
But this time, the attacker could not escape out the back exit. The large man continued swinging a bat at the objects in the room. He probably could have made a pig’s breakfast of things in a matter of seconds. But he seemed bent on utter decimation, and he was taking his time, going over everything thoroughly. His back to Jay, he did not notice the loaded pistol pointing at him.
Adrenaline rushed through Jay’s body, his senses acute, his objective within reach. Surprisingly, he wasn’t out for revenge. He didn’t want a mess. His mind was on automatic, instantly accessing the many hours he had spent training, practicing, studying for a situation just as this, what he had originally justified as caution and mere sport. What happened next passed in only a few seconds.
Jay ordered the man to drop his weapon.
The man turned to face Jay and said, “Okay. I don’t want any trouble.” Then he dropped his worn, wooden bat on the floor. It was scratched and even chipped in a few places, and it generated a heavy kerthunk as it hit the floor.
Jay glanced at the bat. Then he saw the man reach under his jacket. Jay’s next move was pure reflex. He didn’t even think about it. He aimed and fired. Maybe he missed his intended target. Maybe he didn’t. The attacker’s gun fell to the floor as his head flung forward. The gunshot rang in Jay’s ears for what seemed a full minute, as splotches of blood splattered against the opposite wall.
As it turns out, the FBI had been after this thug, who went by the name “the Ripper”—many people speculated because he had a lack of imagination, but only God truly knows why—for felonies reported in three states. Apparently, he had been semi-freelance muscle with his own ties to organized crime. No link was ever proven between him and J&D’s competitors, but WBH coincidentally changed ownership shortly thereafter. One of the more controversial radio talk-show hosts even speculated that WBH owner had been called back by “his mob boss” for so totally flubbing the operation.
Jay’s story hit the TV news, complete with footage of Damian’s assault from the J&D security camera. (It was a digital camera, and Damian had kept a copy of the footage on disc.) Commentators argued whether Jay was justified in shooting the intruder in the head as he did, or whether he even was aiming at the man’s head or at some other part of his body. In any case, it was hard for anyone to garner any sympathy for the thug. And because the Ripper was armed, the law after much hemming and hawing eventually came down on Jay’s side, and even Baedes couldn’t fix it (though he did promise to keep a close eye on the Alvarez brothers).
Ted and Clyde held off on Christmas dinner, until December 31. That night, they had a grand New Year’s party: Michael, Mira, Jay and Damian and their families, and numerous others whom Ted and Michael knew. All left 10 pounds heavier than when they arrived.
The only person missing, from Clydene’s perspective, was Jane. Weeks earlier, Clyde had quietly called Jane and invited her and hers to New Year’s 2008. Jane just as quietly had replied that she didn’t think they should see each other any more. Clyde didn’t remember the last time she had been dumped.
Clyde carried her glass of merlot, meandered back to her office. Without turning on the light, she shuffled through the room, to the window. In the dark, the room felt cramped, closed in. But at the window, she met a bright half-moon that sent flashes glinting off the dark liquid in her glass. She sipped. Through pursed lips, she breathed in its aroma and flavor. She closed her eyes as she savored undertones of cherry and oak.
“Not enjoying the party?” Michael said from behind her. “You made it possible, as usual.”
She turned to face him. “Oh, I was just thinking.” She slid her index finger around the rim of her wine glass.
“About what?” Michael asked.
Clyde paused a moment, to put her thoughts into words. “Did you ever dream about moving somewhere else? Somewhere far, far away?”
“Somewhere where everything is simpler?” He seemed to know exactly what she was feeling.
“Yeah,” she said. “Why do we stay here?”
Michael looked out the window for a moment. Then he said, “Each of us is who he is. And you’re going to be the same person you are, no matter where you live. You’re going to act the same way, and you’re going to feel the same way. You can’t escape who you are.
“But somewhere else, you may not be in a position to do anything about it. That might make things simpler. But it doesn’t make anything any better.”
Clyde nodded, and the two stared out the window a while longer.
When Clyde turned around, Ted was watching her from the hallway.
