My son brought his boyfriend home for Sunday dinner, and the second I saw that young man’s face I went cold with a serving spoon still in my hand. Twenty minutes later I had locked him in my own basement and was calling the police — and I was wrong to do it, and I would do it again, and both of those are true.

I was the last adult at that school to speak to Emmett Rakes. He came to my room at lunchtime because he had a splinter, and I took it out, and I asked him if he was all right and he said yes, and he went back to class.

That is the entire content of the last conversation and I have run it four thousand times.

The town did not blame Roarke Rakes for very long. That is the thing about a town.

Within about eight weeks there was a version going round, and the version was that Suzanne Rakes had been difficult, and that there had been a report from the school that got out of hand, and that if a certain nurse had minded her own business that boy would still be having his dinner at home.

In the May there was a school board meeting about something else entirely. About forty people, in that cafeteria, on a Tuesday evening.