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wanted my daughter to recover. But where her mother saw her recovery in forgetting and pretending this never happened, I saw it coming more by way of facing the devil, you know? Looking him square in the eye and taking back a piece of what he had stolen. And I was right, wasn’t I? Jesus Christ, I wish I wasn’t, but I was.
    I asked him the next logical question. “If you felt so strongly, why did you agree?”
    He thought about this for several seconds. I think he had asked himself this same question a million times, but he had never had to say the answer out loud. When he did, he looked at me with a blank face, as though it should have been obvious to me. Tom had not yet come to see that the dynamics at play in his marriage were anything but obvious—or normal, for that matter.
    Because if I was wrong, if Jenny didn’t get past it, I would be blamed. So why did I agree? Because I was a coward.

 
    Chapter Four
    What I haven’t mentioned yet is the carving on Jenny’s back. It didn’t really become important to the story until now, and I should explain it before I go on. Everything happened so quickly the night of Jenny’s rape. She was at the hospital within an hour of being found. She was then sedated. Her parents arrived within a half hour of that, immediately bombarded with the decision regarding the treatment. It had to be administered by the psychiatrist through the IV that the nurse inserted into the back of Jenny’s hand. There were waivers and forms to review and sign, guarantees for payment. The treatment was not covered by insurance. And, finally, she was prepped for surgery to repair the damage from the rape, and for the thorough forensic examination.
    Tom stayed with her until she was rolled away to an operating room. He said it was like watching his daughter in a manufacturing plant. He had visited one in Detroit years before, when he sold Fords. Metal parts, nuts and bolts, plastic and wires and computer chips, thousands of workers with busy hands and machines with moving parts putting things together. As he watched Jenny’s limp body handled by five people, each with a job to do on her body, each concerned only with her body as her mind was manipulated with chemicals and forced to stay asleep, that was the image Tom recalled, and he was deeply disturbed by it, and by his own deferential behavior. He had wanted to lift her from the gurney, raise his fist in the air, and tell everyone to leave her the hell alone. But, of course, he did nothing of the sort.
    Not to belabor their differences, but Charlotte had wanted to join her daughter in her sedation, fall asleep, and forget this ever happened. She did not watch the professionals do their work. Instead, she went home and relieved the babysitter, took a sleeping pill, tucked Lucas’s blankets tighter around his body, and then curled up in the spare bed a few feet away. She listened to him breathe until she fell asleep herself. I would come to learn that she did this often to avoid being in the same bed with Tom.
    When they were finished repairing the tears to Jenny’s genitals and bowels, she was admitted to the ICU. Dr. Baird stopped up to see how Tom was doing. He was joined by Detective Parsons shortly after. It was then that Tom first learned about the carving on her back. Parsons explained it this way:
    We had the preliminary report from the forensic examination. They had some samples of fluids and hairs that needed to be tested, but as we now know, nothing would ever be found. During the examination, they found the carving. It was more of a cut, really, in terms of how deep it was. It was only an inch long, but it required seventeen stitches. No one noticed it at first because she was so dirty and there were so many other superficial scratches that they didn’t think much of it until they’d washed her. This one cut kept bleeding. The team that examined the woods where Jenny was attacked