This story contains mentions of suicide and intimate partner violence. If you need support, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and the National Domestic Violence Hotline are available 24/7.

I chose to approach his house on foot.

It was dusk in early June. Fireflies blinked in the high grass. In the distance, an older couple saw me and froze in their rocking chairs. I waved, to put them at ease, but they didn’t move. Our uniforms give us away. They’re a distinctive shade of congealed blood.  

I kept going, reached the end of their field, descended into a ditch, spotted a patch of irises, and picked a few. Then I crossed a tiny brook. I walked up the slope to a rusted cattle gate and let myself in. There was no alarm. Nothing but a mourning dove calling from a cottonwood tree.

I’d memorized his property during research: two grassy acres and a restored antebellum farmhouse, painted cornflower blue, with solar panels, a wraparound porch, and a yard strung with Tibetan prayer flags.

I saw him before he saw me, so I had a few seconds to study him. Like his neighbors, he was sitting in a rocking chair on his porch. He was absorbed in a book I recognized from the airport: Everything in Its Time, by a celebrity Buddhist monk. One hand was holding the book open, and the other was holding onto a can of La Croix, at arm’s length, like a kid holding onto the ledge of a pool. He had silver-gold stubble, iron eyes, and a granite jaw. He wore red pajama bottoms and nothing else.

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I called, “Graham Dawson Catterall IV.”

He looked up, took in my uniform and rifle, and after a moment, put his book down and stood up.

“My name is Robin Taft,” I said. “Do you understand why I’m here?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I know so, ma’am.”

There was nothing to do but begin.

I ascended the steps and held out the bouquet of irises. He looked confused, then a little sick; but he took them all the same, and held them to his chest like a bride.

I pulled my pistol and held it to his temple in one quick stroke.

“Inside,” I said.

This is what Graham Dawson Catterall IV did, 18 years ago:

Scion of a Southern business empire and convinced that his influencer wife, Kelly O’Rae, was cheating on him, he went through her laptop. Instead of an affair, he discovered she’d been searching terms like “how to tell if he’s controlling you” and “best divorce lawyers.”

That night, when she got home to their palatial six-bedroom mansion, he presented her with a bouquet of irises. Then he said he had a surprise for her: an exotic weekend getaway. Kelly had been looking forward to a few days of rest after wrapping a campaign with Southern Living, but he insisted. She complied, pretending to be excited. She knew not to get on his bad side.

Once she was at the car, he held a pistol to her temple. He told her to get in the back of the SUV. There, he tied her up with nylon rope, sealed her mouth with duct tape, and positioned her on the doggy bed where their Vizslas, Butter and Grits, usually laid en route to promo events.

He drove straight to their cabin in the mountains. By the time they got there, Kelly was shaking so hard she couldn’t walk. Graham dragged her to the back bedroom and tied her to the bed.

But he just wanted to talk, he said. He confronted her about her search history. She confessed she hadn’t handled it well. She agreed to stay married, that they’d work it out. He fed her grilled cheese sandwiches and guacamole, the two things he was proud of making well, but kept her tied up. He allowed her to go to the bathroom to urinate and to throw up whatever she’d been able to eat. She assured him how good it was, that it was her fault that she couldn’t keep it down. Still, he kept his rifle and pistol with him, to keep her from “regressing.”

Meanwhile at home, Butter and Grits had broken out of the yard and shown up on the neighbors’ porch. That prompted the neighbors to investigate—but Graham and Kelly weren’t home, which was strange, because Kelly had promised them a wine night. Then they noticed their texts weren’t going through. They contacted Kelly’s friends and family. They didn’t know where she was either. But Kelly had been confiding in them over the years about Graham’s erratic behavior.

When the police arrived at the cabin, blue and red lights flashing in the pines, Kelly assured Graham that she’d tell them it was all a misunderstanding. She’d tell them they were just doing some bondage roleplay. They agreed on the story.

But as soon as Graham went outside, Kelly started screaming for help. The police got past him and untied her. She collapsed and screamed and beat her fists on the carpet. Once at the station, she pressed charges.

With her permission, her attorneys sought the new non-carceral sentence that was popularly known as “Golden Rule”: Whatever violent interpersonal crime you had committed would now be visited upon you, by a state-ordained minister wearing a dark red uniform, at some point in your life.

But you never knew when.

Now Graham Dawson Catterall IV was tied to his own bed with nylon rope. I’d even made sure it was the same shade of yellow, because I enjoy paying attention to detail. I put him in the same position he’d first put Kelly: hog-tied and facing the wall. So far, I was acting within expected bounds. There’s an entire branch of scholarship dealing with the question of whether overreach is an inevitable consequence of justice administered by the state, because the state delegates the right of revenge to appointed professionals—when it should reside with those who were harmed, as only those who were harmed can gauge when revenge is served. Food for thought, that. There’s even an academic journal devoted to Golden Rule studies. I read it sometimes.

I moved into the guest room down the hall. I was impressed that Graham kept it ready. Heterosexual men are not always attentive to such things, as a matter of conditioning, when women so often are, as a matter of conditioning. The bed had a green plaid duvet and matching pillows. On the walls were tasteful paintings of buddhas in gilt frames. The windows looked down onto the backyard, which had a lovely young oak tree, and a laundry line bouncing in the breeze, with clothespins twitching back and forth like foosball players.

I slept beautifully.

In the morning, I untied Graham. His limbs had cramped, so he stumbled out of bed to use the bathroom. Then I tied him up again—this time, with hands and feet bound separately, which mirrored the progression with Kelly. He seemed calm. But that was common this early in the game. So long as the sentence progressed the way he thought it would—as “an eye for an eye,” as most of the general public also believed—he would serve it with equanimity, even smugness.

This is where science ends and creativity begins.

“Eye for an eye” implies a direct recreation of the crime. And in fact, that’s how the sentences first played out: as direct recreations. After a few years, though, it was clear that convicts were happy to get Golden Rule, because they knew exactly what to expect and could prepare for it. So the system matured. A parallel praxis developed. A shadow system evolved. At the same time, we ministers encouraged the myth of direct recreation, as the state once encouraged the myth that the goal of incarceration was reform.

Golden Rule means: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Its implied inverse is, What you have done unto others shall be done unto you. It’s less specific. It allows for invention. The exact crime is not recreated, but the trauma is.

I left Graham’s room to plan the next steps.   

I remembered the first time I learned the phrase commensurate severity. I heard it on a radio show about the new law. I repeated the phrase in a whisper. It appealed to the poet in me—or rather, the poet I’d once been—so much that I enrolled in the academy a year later, to train as a minister.

Commensurate severity was a phrase that would become as familiar as mens rea or reasonable doubt: a concept formulated by Anna Carraway, building on the work of Blackstone, Bentham, and Foucault. She was the foremost of a new wave of theorists. Now that we as a country had committed to transitioning out of the prison-based system, we had to innovate new forms of punishment.

Once someone was sentenced to Golden Rule, they usually took one of three paths. We ministers had nicknames for them. First there were flakes: those who faded into shadows of their former selves, or took their own lives rather than face their sentence. Then there were meringues, named for the confection: those who believed in “eye for an eye,” and boasted about being able to withstand what they’d done to others, only to crumble and melt as soon as their sentence began.

Then there was the third group, jawbreakers: those whose mental strength—or ironclad entitlement—gave them a genuine resistance. 

Graham Dawson Catterall IV was a jawbreaker. I’d clocked that early.

I trailed my finger along the spines of books in his hallway. Thich Nhat Hanh, bell hooks, Brené Brown. At the end of the hallway, there was an alcove with a bell, altar, and embroidered cushion. We had a meditator on our hands. He’d not only mentally prepared for this moment for 18 years, he’d spared no expense in indulging himself. That’s why he was so sanguine. He’d never considered that, in doing so, he’d be making things that much harder for himself.

I scouted the kitchen. His cupboards were stocked with health food: quinoa, almond butter. But there was also some junk food—a bag of desiccated peach rings, a pack of cheap bologna. (I noted the meat: his Buddhism had its limits.) I made myself a sandwich, then started unpacking bread, cheese, and avocadoes from my duffel bag. I’d be feeding him the same things he’d fed Kelly, to start.

When I arrived at Kelly O’Rae’s house for her longitudinal check-in, light snow was falling along the Blue Ridge Parkway. We’d discussed whether to delay until after the snow, but she seemed anxious to get it over with.

She met me dressed in woolen layers. She was impossibly pretty, in an elfin way: aloe eyes, coral lips, big smile. She looked more beautiful in a ponytail than most people did on the red carpet. She used to receive marriage proposals in her comments daily, including one—verified—from a minor Swedish prince.

I followed her into the kitchen, where floor-to-ceiling windows looked over the Shenandoah Valley. She’d remarried. She had three kids, two boys and a girl. They were over at friends’ houses, now, and her husband was in Maui for a real estate conference. We had the house to ourselves—just us and her two latest Vizslas, Pimento and Cheese.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she called over her shoulder.

“Green tea, if you have it.”

I sat at the marble counter and looked out at the view. A few minutes later, Kelly appeared with my tea, and a black coffee for herself. She sat down and cupped her mug. Her hands were shaking.

“So how does this go?” she said in an artificially bright voice. “It’s been a long time. You have access to my testimony from then. I’m sure that’d be more accurate than anything I could say now.”

“Yes, I’ve reviewed it,” I said. “You were very brave.”

She just shrugged.

I could tell how nervous she was. I pitched my voice to be lower, more gentle. “These follow-up interviews are not to ascertain the facts of the case. We already know those. We’re trying to assess the trauma you’ve sustained over the long term.”

She gave me a look that startled me. Just for a moment, she looked like the pictures in her file from 18 years ago.

I picked up my pen and clicked out the tip. “How are you feeling?”

At noon, I brought Graham his first meal of grilled cheese and guacamole.

His hands were tied close to his mouth, so he ate hunched over the plate, crumbs spilling on the duvet. It gave him the look of a gobbling rat. The irony hit me, not for the first time, that this iteration of supposedly anti-carceral punishment did, in fact, include incarceration. I sat in the armchair by the window with my pistol and rifle. A light summer rain fell outside. I was getting more comfortable, making his space into my space.

Then something caught my eye.

On a table in the far corner, there was a single orchid. It sat in a vase atop a long prayer cloth that hung to each side, like the runner for an altar. I got up to examine the flower. It was exquisite. It had four petals, turgid and bruisable: a spade, a tongue, and two long wings that spread to either side.  

“Isn’t she beautiful?” said Graham.

I startled a bit. He hadn’t spoken since the porch.

I straightened up. “Yes.”

He seemed encouraged that I’d answered. His body relaxed and his voice gained momentum. “When the topsoil gets dry, she’ll need water. It’s a Gold of Kinabalu orchid. They only grow on one side of one mountain in Malaysia. Nowhere else in the world.”

I spotted an opportunity for creativity, on my part.

“Oh?” I said. “Were you there yourself?”

“Yeah,” he said, relaxing even more. “About 12 years ago. Crazy period of my life, um …” He reined himself in. “I’d really changed, though, and learned a lot. This retreat I went on—it really opened my eyes. Then I spent a few years in Bali. I wanted something to remember that transformative period of my life. These orchids require a lot of care, especially out of their natural habitat, so I thought it would be a good thing for me to have.”

I wondered why he hadn’t adopted a humble daisy instead. Though also, I could guess why.

“A lot of care?” I prompted.

“Well, see,” he said, “they evolved only to grow in this one place, right? So you have to follow a schedule—I have it written on a paper in that drawer there—not only watering it on a schedule, but like, changing the temperature back and forth. I’ve kept her alive for 12 years now. See, I don’t live on my own time anymore. I live on her time.”

He gave me a self-deprecating smile. It was all very transparent. He wanted me to like him—for his good looks, his performance of self-reflection, and his story about the orchid. He’d trained himself to be nonreactive when his time came, but also to retain his natural charm. It had never entered his mind that none of it would work. How could it, when his whole life to date had been evidence to the contrary?

I took the orchid out of its vase, pulled it apart, dropped the pieces on the floor, and crushed them with my foot.

He’d started shouting in the middle of it—What are you doing, what are you doing you [expletive] [expletive], and so on. I tuned it out. Environmental noise, part of the job, for which I’m paid well.

On my way out, I picked up Graham’s copy of Everything in Its Time and started flipping through it as I walked down the stairs. He’d highlighted certain passages in neon green. We should always listen to all perspectives, said one highlight. All perspectives are equally valid, because we are all part of each other. We are interchangeable beings.

Kelly and I talked for hours. Outside, the sun went down, and the snowy hills turned blue. Then silence came. We just sat together, looking at a line of firs in the distance.

Even with all the resources at her command—family, friends, therapists, wealth—she’d wanted to tell me everything. Not just the salacious bits that had been splattered on the tabloids, but the years afterward: the nightmares, the sleeplessness, the flashbacks, the shaking, the medications, the panic attacks, the self-recrimination, the desperate need for intimacy, the longing for absolute protection, the constant seesawing between warmth and chill that she didn’t seem to be able to control.

Then she said, “May I ask you a personal question, Robin?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to you?”

I knew what she was asking. She was asking what had happened to me, once upon a time, such that I became one of the pool of survivors who were eligible to become ministers.

Anna Carraway wrote:

In civil law, a victim may seek personal remedy. In criminal law, the state must seek remedy on behalf of the victim, as the offense is considered to be not against the victim, but against the state. This is plainly absurd. A rapist does not rape the state, any more than an archer targets the air. Even if we accept that the criminal offense is against the state, the site of the offense is particular. Furthermore, I argue, only sited bodies have the right to carry out punishment on behalf of the state.

Kelly was one of those sited bodies. I was one of those sited bodies. And now Kelly was asking who had done what to me, to make me a site.

A few images flashed across my mind, resulting in a life that jumped the rails and took another track entirely. Then only blankness. This is what usually happened when someone asked me about it.

“I’m sorry,” said Kelly. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to ask.”

“You are.”

“But you don’t want to answer.”

After a long moment I said, “I wanted to be a poet.”

Kelly knew what I meant.

“I wanted to be a park ranger,” she said.

That made me smile, reflexively.  

“I never wanted to be a social media personality,” she continued. “That was never the plan. The plan was to help my family. You know my real name isn’t Kelly?”

“I do,” I said. “It’s Gretchen.”

“Yeah, well. Not as catchy, that.”

“I like it.”

“Thanks. I like the name ‘Robin,’ too.”

I nodded. “So do I. My parents thought it was the perfect tonal balance for ‘Taft.’ That the phrase might not be as beautiful as cellar door, but it was close.”

“Robin Taft,” Kelly said aloud.

“Robin Taft,” I repeated, and for a moment my own name sounded strange to me, hanging in midair.

Kelly returned to her story. “Anyway, my videos did well, I started making money, and my mom could buy us new winter coats. So then I had to keep making money. I tried to do a couple videos on wildlife—but they didn’t take off. The view count sucked. People just wanted to see me trying on makeup.”

She shifted in her seat. “But my aunt, my mom’s older sister … she was a park ranger. I liked her brown uniform. I wanted to be like her, out in the woods. But after Graham, my confidence …” She shook her head and waved to the line of firs. “I’m afraid to even go down to those trees on my own property. I just can’t make myself do it, after all these years. I start shaking. It’s like part of me just died.”

I nodded. I knew the feeling.

“Maybe I should become a minister, like you,” she said. “Would I get my confidence back?”

When I was a little girl, I wrote this haiku:

Come into the grass
where fireflies bob around.
I have a peach pie.

That’s how my life looks, when I think back to being a child. In the enchanted realm of my summertime haiku, that man never came along.

But he did.

I selected Golden Rule as his punishment. He died by hanging shortly after serving his sentence. That made him one of the 25 percent of convicts who die from suicide, up to and including one year after their sentence. Soon after, I joined the academy, because I wanted to be part of the same system that had given me justice.

And now, I couldn’t help but notice that, below Graham’s bedroom window, there was a scene straight from my childhood poem: a front yard in early summer, bobbing with fireflies. The realm of my summertime haiku made real. In another life, I could leave this room and descend those stairs and let myself out the front door into that yard, make myself at home with peach pie and fireflies, and write a bit of poetry in a notebook.

But that life was not this one. This was the jumped-track life.

Anna Carraway wrote: Every crime is unique and particular; therefore, every punishment must be unique and particular.

Golden Rule was my poetry, now.

After I tore apart Graham’s orchid, he wouldn’t look at me or speak to me. He started to refuse food. I responded by bringing him more lavish meals: a sandwich with milk, a bowl of pasta. When he finally did pick up a piece of tortellini, I immediately kicked the bowl onto the carpet. Over the course of the next hour, he managed to pick up a few pieces of pasta with his toes and maneuver them to his mouth. He spent the next day doing the same.  

On the fifth day, however, he seemed to have caught a second wind. When I entered the room with a Kraft Single on a plate, he had a steely look in his eyes. He asked, “When does this end?”

“When you die,” I said.

He looked astonished. “The fuck are you talking about? I can’t die!”

“You certainly can.”

“They’ll have your ass for that. That is illegal.” He struggled anew against his bonds. “You’re just trying to scare me. You’re a victim too, right? So you’re just taking it out on me? This makes you feel big? And you think no one will ever figure it out?”

“They don’t care, Graham.”

He started yelling. You [expletive] [expletive], you have no idea what my family can do to you, and so on. I sighed and walked out. I’d heard it all before. Later his invectives turned into hoarse screams for help to anyone who might be passing by, and so on. It was just part of the work. I didn’t feel bad about it. It was easy, now, to recall the particulars of the original case: Graham had admitted no fault, but rather hired a boutique law firm, which argued that his crime was mild, compared to what he could have done. After all, Graham had made grilled cheese sandwiches for Kelly and let her go to the bathroom, hadn’t he? It was a nice kidnapping. He hadn’t raped or killed her. And, his attorney said, Kelly had seemed cooperative the whole time. And even if she wasn’t cooperative, how could he have understood how upset she was, given his state of mind? How could a man not be upset, after discovering that his wife was secretly pursuing a divorce? After discovering that his whole life was a lie?

No, I did not feel bad about what I was doing.

To my dismay, though, I did feel bad about the orchid.

On the eighth day, Graham stopped eating again. His eyes became glassy and red-rimmed, his face gaunt, his lips grey. His beauty was gone. He smelled bad. He started murmuring to himself.  

I was sitting in his armchair, trying to sketch the orchid from memory. The petals lay on the floor, four shriveled brown slips, right where I’d left them. I’d made a snap decision to throw Graham off balance, right at the moment he thought he’d found it. But I’d also killed a living thing. That didn’t sit right with me. Now I was trying to recapture how the orchid had made me feel when I first laid eyes on it. I couldn’t write about it. Drawing it felt safer.

“All phenomena are neutral,” he said, half to me, half to himself.

An early summer thunderstorm rumbled in the distance. 

Still sketching, I decided to humor him. “‘There is nothing either good or bad,’” I intoned, “‘but thinking makes it so.’”

“Yes,” he said, and tried to point at me for emphasis, but the nylon ropes held his hands in place. He seemed drunk. “What you’re doing to me is bad, but I’m not going to react.”

“You did it to yourself, when you did what you did to Kelly.”

“You’re the one getting me back for it, though.”

“I’m a minister of the state, Graham. I’m carrying out the will of the state.”

“How can you just wash your hands like that?” he said in a dazed voice. “How do you live with yourself? Aren’t you disgusted?”  

What could I tell him? That I felt quite the opposite? That years of training and delivering sentences had inured me to exactly this kind of entreaty? That we ministers enjoyed the very best mental health services available, as well as decontamination protocols after each sentence served, and generous chunks of time off, to jet to any sunny beach or snowy slope we desired?

“Remember what Hamlet said,” I said, tapping my temple. “‘Thinking makes it so.’”

On the ninth day, Graham seemed to have better control of himself. When I came in to check on him, he was ready. “Kelly went with me willingly,” he said. “Did she ever tell you that?”

Internally, I sighed. Everything he said now would just make things worse for him. But I played to him, furrowing my brow. “No …?”

“Yep,” he said. “She got up in that courtroom and lied about everything. She went along with it from the beginning. She thanked me for being such a good husband. For taking care of her and her family for so many years. And she admitted to me—said to my face—that she took full responsibility, that she had handled everything badly. Did she tell you that part?”

“No, she didn’t,” I said in mock astonishment.

“She never confided in me. She would just make calls to her little friends instead of, you know, talking to me like a mature human being. How was I supposed to know how she felt? I know how it sounds, but really, I’m the victim in this situation. So you see, what you’re doing to me is bad. And I have my pride. I am not going to react.”

I gave him a quizzical look. “What are you talking about, Graham? I’m not doing anything to you. You’re innocent. You’re free to go at any time.”

He stared at me. “Do you have a husband? I would be shocked, honestly shocked, if you did.”

I just laughed. I couldn’t help it.

He stared at me, then started pulling at his restraints, then started screaming and thrashing. All the pillows and bedcovers came off at last. He started thumping his hands against the headboard until they bled. It got very loud, so I put on my noise-canceling headphones and listened to Bach. I split myself—part of me monitoring his movements and cradling my pistol to make sure he didn’t break free—and part of me elsewhere, not in the armchair at all, but somewhere nice and cold, like Banff.

“Maybe I should become a minister, like you,” said Kelly. “Would I get my confidence back?”

“Maybe you would,” I said. “I have.”

“You seem very in control.”

I smiled. “That’s also the result of a lot of training.”

“It must have a cost, though. You can’t do this work and not have it affect you somehow. I don’t know if I could hurt another person, even if they deserved it. That can’t be the only way.”

“It’s the only way I’ve found.”

 It came out more defensively than I intended. 

Pimento the dog rose, ambled over, and craned her neck for some pats. Kelly obliged her. We gazed out at the deep blue yard. This conversation was going to take however long it was going to take, because Kelly seemed to need it.

Maybe I did too.

On the eleventh day, I began to refer to Graham as “Shithead.” But this only had the effect of steeling him further. He just couldn’t believe he deserved any of this; in fact, his resolve was growing. This was common in jawbreakers, especially jawbreakers from wealthy backgrounds, but even Graham was an outlier. His certainty was a bulwark against panic. The more he suffered, the more self-righteous he felt.

I was getting tired. I kept replaying my conversation with Kelly in my head: her line of firs, on one hand, and my peach pie, on the other. Both of us had once had a fantasy of ultimate safety that now seemed as remote as Pluto. How to get there? How long would it take? What ship could we possibly construct?

I looked at the table with the vase and the long prayer cloth. The orchid petals were still on the floor. I wished I could reconstruct them, make the orchid anew. But it was irreplaceable. There would never be another just like it.

“Hey, Shithead,” I said. “You know what I’m wondering right now?”

He blinked and focused on me. 

“I’m wondering why I feel sad about the orchid, but not about—”

He held his breath, waiting for what he thought I was going to say.

“—not about the irises. I picked that whole bouquet for you at the edge of your property. They’re in a vase on the kitchen table, now.”

He wasn’t holding his breath anymore. Now he was wheezing. That was the only sound in the room for a while.

Finally I said, “Maybe it’s because the irises are being appreciated. By me. Even though they’ll die too, eventually. They’re being loved and cared for, right up until the end.”

Still wheezing, he watched me from under his brow, like a caged wolf.

“But you loved and cared for the orchid too, right Shithead?” I said. “Is that why I feel bad? Because you did do this one good thing, taking care of the orchid, and I destroyed it? The only good thing about you?”

“It doesn’t fucking matter,” he snarled. “I’ll just buy another one as soon as you leave.”

“People like Graham can’t be reformed,” said Kelly. “You know that, right?”

I nodded. I did.

“Not by prison, not by restorative or transformative justice, not by Golden Rule, not by whatever trendy thing y’all do next. Nothing can reform people like Graham. They’ll always see themselves as the victim. I thought Golden Rule would bring me some kind of peace, but I know that whatever you do to him, he won’t change.”

“I hear you.”

“So why go ahead with it?”

“Because justice still needs to be served on behalf of the state.”

“But if he’s not reformed—and he doesn’t feel sorry—doesn’t that mean the system doesn’t work?”

“It depends on the point of the system. The point of Golden Rule is retribution, not reform.”

“So then we just have all these extra broken people wandering around.”

“Yes.”

“And some of them kill themselves.”

I nodded. “Twenty-five percent.”

She shook her head in a sick kind of wonder. “Then why?” she said. “Why do they still do the bad thing at all?”

“Because they refuse to understand that it was bad.”

“What would have to happen for them to understand it was bad?” Her voice rose higher as she spoke. “What will it take to get through to them? What do we have to do? How long do we have to wait before they stop?”

I shook my head. “I’ve been handling these cases for years,” I said, “and I honestly don’t know.”

“How did you feel after … after justice was served, in your case?”

I met her eye. “Better. Especially after. He died by suicide.”

Kelly snorted. “Graham would never commit suicide. He thinks too much of himself.”

“Well, there’s plenty of retribution to be had, otherwise. I’ll make sure of that.”

“According to what?”

I explained the concept of commensurate severity.

“So I’ll feel better afterward, too,” said Kelly.

“That’s the hope.”

Kelly threw up her hands. “I always thought that building a new life was the right way to heal. To prove to myself that it can be done.”

“And? Are you happy?”

Finally, she said, “I seem to be.”

“Which is not the same thing.”

“No. I want to be the person I was before I met him, the one who wanted to be a park ranger. But like I said, she died.”

“Yes, but …” I trailed off and followed her gaze out the window: the line of firs, the deepening dark, the contours of snow on the patio. The moon behind the clouds gave the scene a milky glow.

“I can go through the motions in my head,” she said quietly. “Just to stand out there. Scarf, boots, coat, hat …”

“I’d go with you.”

She looked at me, startled.

I didn’t blame her. I’d startled myself. The offer had bubbled out before I was even consciously aware of it. As a minister, I was dancing at the edge of ethical propriety.

She got up so suddenly and with such an angry look that I jumped off my seat. I’d overstepped. I’d miscalculated everything and now she was going to throw me out. Both dogs got up, alert, ready to defend her.

She stalked past me. I followed her into the entry hall, chastened.

She put on her scarf, boots, coat, and hat.

On the night of the twelfth day, I cut Graham free at last.

I let him choose one thing to take with him. He chose the prayer cloth where the orchid had stood. He meant it as a rebuke to me, but I was pleased with his choice: It would make the final step that much easier. It was poetic, even.

As soon as he got enough feeling back in his limbs, I drew my pistol and told him to move. He stumbled down the stairs, prayer cloth around his shoulders, grasping the banister for support. But he was clearly elated. He whimpered in joy and gasped lungsful of air. His ordeal was nearly over.

I steered him out the door, onto the back patio, and into the backyard. There were still fireflies blinking on and off, even at this hour. In their midst, under the young oak tree, there was a stool.

Kelly and I stood together under the firs. Our breath puffed out in icy clouds. She reached out to take my hand, and I let her. Her hand was shaking, but only a little.

The snow here looked like ocean waves, because it had fallen in patches between the trees. It was very dark. Pimento and Cheese trotted ahead, fearless, barely visible, keeping to the valleys. The snow fell fresh. We didn’t say anything.

Kelly couldn’t be a park ranger, but this was enough for now. We were where we had imagined ourselves to be.

After my assignment was complete, I went back into Graham’s kitchen and started opening all the cupboards. There was something I was looking for. But I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it. I opened every cupboard and then every drawer. Wood banged against wood. I couldn’t find it. Had I imagined it? I started the sequence over again, because I needed to be thorough. Cupboard, fridge, drawer—

There.

I struggled to open the bag as I walked out the front door. It was made of cheap plastic. The more I struggled with it, the more incredulous I became. This bag was like some kind of sadistic intelligence test. It had hardened with age. Why could I not just rip these little ridges at the top, so that it would split clean down the middle? I was off the porch now and into the high green grass. With the rattling crickets. And the blinking fireflies.

One last time I pulled at the top of the bag with all the strength in my shoulders, and the bag ripped open with such force that the peach rings exploded into the air, like fireworks.