She thanked me for calling and explained again why she had kept me out of her meetings with Jason and Colin. I assured her it wasn’t necessary to repeat the reasons.
“So my understanding is that Jason has told you that our defense is that the contact between him and the complainant was consensual.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did he also tell you that he doesn’t have any texts or e-mails to prove they had a relationship?”
“No.” He hadn’t told me that, but it explained why I hadn’t been able to find any, despite all my attempts.
“Obviously it would be helpful if a third party could corroborate his version.”
“If anyone could, it would have been Colin. He already told me that he suspected, but didn’t really know anything.”
“I wasn’t talking about Colin. I was talking about you. Jason indicated that you may have been aware that there was someone else.”
“You’re asking me to lie for him. Just say it.”
“No, I’m explaining how you might be in a position to help, if you wanted to. I understand that this isn’t easy. To be clear, Jason has no idea I’m talking to you about this, and it has been a real challenge to get him to open up to me about your marriage, although I’m sure you can see how it will be relevant to his case.”
I closed my eyes. I could feel all of the doors ripping open around me, and there was no way I could pull them shut. Every new word she spoke made me feel dizzy.
“He says that intimacy—or physical intimacy, at least—has not been a regular part of your marriage, and not at all for three years.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Please, hear me out. We have a good argument for consent, and all we really need is reasonable doubt. But it’s hard to paint Jason as the good guy when his defense is that he was leading a secret life, cheating on his wife. If that part of your relationship was over, if you knew—if even part of you knew . . . Some couples have unspoken understandings. Maybe the two of you even had a good reason for separating that aspect of intimacy from your marriage.”
She knew. She fucking knew. It wasn’t going to be enough for me to smile and stand by Jason’s side and make sure the whole world knew that I believed he was innocent. She needed me to be the reason he cheated. I would be the screwed-up wife who was too frigid to keep a young, attractive man happy in the bedroom. He would seem heroic for loving me in the first place and then staying with me despite all my damage.
I cut to the chase. “You think the DA will back off if he knows I’m the girl who spent three years getting tortured by Charles Franklin.”
“I’ll be honest, Angela. This is not exactly my favorite part of the job. But, yes, your background gives a different dimension to your marriage and therefore to Jason’s interactions with this woman.”
So I was right. Jason had told her about me, unless, of course, Olivia had found out on her own, which seemed plausible. “I didn’t know about Kerry,” I said. “At least, not specifically about her. And definitely not about a three-month relationship.”
“So three months is longer than you suspected?”
Of course. Why did she sound confused? Had it been longer? “Jason told me it was three months.”
“Okay, but you’re saying that you did suspect outside encounters of some kind, but without, let’s say, an emotional affair. Is that a fair representation?”
If this was what it felt like to have someone who was supposedly on our side question me, I could not imagine what it would be like to get cross-examined by the lawyer trying to put my husband behind bars.
“I need to think about this. I don’t want to talk any more right now.”
“That’s fine. I totally understand. But, Angela, please remember: this woman is trying to destroy your husband, which means she’s destroying your family. That’s going to have consequences for both you and Spencer.” At least this time she didn’t hesitate on my son’s name. “Helping Jason helps the two of you, too.”
I heard Jason calling out my own name from downstairs. “Hold on,” I yelled, breaking one of my own house rules. “I’m talking to Olivia.”
“Angela!”
Jason was screaming loud enough for people outside to hear. I asked Olivia to hold on and walked from the bedroom to the top of the stairs. I saw Jason being placed in handcuffs in the threshold of our open front door.
For more than a week, I had been expecting this moment, imagining it about to turn the corner at any second. But Jason hadn’t. His expression was panicked, and his eyes looked up at me, pleading.
“Olivia, they’re here,” I said into the phone. “The police. They’re arresting Jason. He didn’t do this. Please, you have to help him.”
III
People v. Jason Powell
30
What does it mean to know something?
I remember Mr. Gardner, my ninth-grade teacher, asking us that question. He was widely regarded as the school’s smartest, most challenging teacher, which meant that most of us had no idea what he was talking about most of the time.
It was supposed to be a lesson about the importance of choosing words carefully. He began by asking us how many facts we thought we knew to a certainty. A long list grew on the chalkboard: the price of a Snickers bar in the vending machine, the name of our PE teacher, our birthdays. Then he said, “Okay, so what if I told you that the penalty for being wrong about one of these facts was having to spend the entire summer in school? Now how many things do you know?”
We immediately second-guessed our so-called knowledge. Maybe prices were being changed at the machine as we spoke. Maybe Ms. Callaway got married, changed her name, and never told the students. And maybe the hospital was wrong about whether we were born a little before midnight or a little after.
“And if the penalty for an error was losing a limb?” Mr. Gardner asked.
The lesson: we don’t really know anything. Not really.
To know something, he argued, was not the same as to be certain beyond all doubt. And to believe something was definitely not the same as to know it.
With that as a backdrop, I’d say the first time I knew Jason cheated was almost exactly two years ago. We had taken a rental in the Hamptons for six full weeks. The cost of renting a small cottage, half a mile from the ocean, was twice what my mother made in a year. That was the bizarro economy of the South Fork these days.
It was a splurge, but Jason assured me we could afford it. He had launched the consulting company and had extra money coming in, on top of the book money we had sunk into the house. We only had one car, of course—the Subaru, before Jason decided we should get the Audi—but that wasn’t a problem. Most days, the three of us were together. To the extent we needed supplementary transportation, the rental house came with bikes. And I could always call my mom in a pinch.
That particular day, I had gone to Susanna’s to help prepare for a dinner party. Jason said he had a meeting at a potential client’s house in Bridgehampton, so Spencer tagged along with Mom on a housecleaning. I was riding my bike home from Susanna’s when I thought I spotted our car parallel-parked on Montauk Highway, in the overflow parking area for Cyril’s. It was postbeach cocktail hour, the time when people popped in for late lunch lobster rolls, predinner raw oysters, and a lot of frozen blender drinks.