That December, I came home for two weeks. The house smelled like cinnamon. My mother had repainted the kitchen. The Ledger story had cooled into a paragraph in the local history of that year, the kind of thing people brought up at graduation parties and quickly changed the subject on.
One night, alone in the kitchen, my mother asked me the question nobody had asked out loud.
"Nora. When you were at that party. Did you know something bad was going to happen?"
I looked at her. She had aged a little in the fall. She was holding a mug with both hands, waiting.
There was a true answer and a safe answer.
"They all had something bad happening," I said. "The whole class, that year. Nobody wanted to be the one who said it."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," I said. "I didn't know. I just stop
