She folds her arms. “What if I tell you I want the jury to know what happened to me? To hear my side of the story?”

I nod, striking a bargain. “Then we put you on the stand,” I promise.

—

THE MOST INTERESTING thing about Jack DeNardi is that he has a rubber band ball on his desk the size of a newborn’s head. Other than that he is exactly what you would expect to find working in a dingy cubicle in the Mercy–West Haven Hospital office: paunch, gray skin, comb-over. He’s a paper pusher, and the only reason I’m here is that I’m fishing. I want to see if there’s anything they’d say about Ruth that might help her—or that is going to hurt her.

“Twenty years,” Jack DeNardi says. “That’s how long she worked here.”

“How many times in those twenty years was Ruth promoted?” I ask.

“Let’s see.” He pores through the files. “Once.”

“Once in twenty years?” I say, incredulous. “Doesn’t that seem low to you?”

Jack shrugs. “I’m really not at liberty to discuss that.”

“Why is that?” I press. “You’re part of a hospital. Isn’t your job to help people?”

“Patients,” he clarifies. “Not employees.”

I snort. Institutions are allowed to scrutinize their personnel and find and label every flaw—but no one ever turns the magnifying glass back on them.

He scrolls through some more paperwork. “The term used in her most recent performance review was prickly.”

I’m not going to disagree with that.

“Clearly Ruth Jefferson is qualified. But from what I can gather in her file, she was passed over for promotions because she was seen by her superiors as a little…uppity.”

I frown. “Ruth’s superior, Marie Malone…how long has she been working here?”

He enters a few keystrokes into his computer. “Roughly ten years.”

“So someone who worked here for ten years was giving Ruth orders—dubious ones at that—and maybe Ruth questioned them from time to time? Does that sound like she’s being uppity…or just assertive?”

He turns to me. “I couldn’t say.”

I stand up. “Thanks for your time, Mr. DeNardi.” I gather my coat and my briefcase, and just before I cross the threshold I turn. “Uppity…or assertive. Is it possible the adjective changes depending on the color of the employee?”

“I resent that implication, Ms. McQuarrie.” Jack DeNardi presses his lips together. “Mercy–West Haven does not discriminate based on race, creed, religion, or sexual orientation.”

“Oh, okay. I see,” I say. “Then it was just dumb luck that Ruth Jefferson was the employee you chose to throw to the wolves.”

As I walk out of the hospital, I consider that none of this conversation can or will be used in court. I’m not even sure what made me turn back at the last minute and toss that final question to the HR employee.

Except, perhaps, that Ruth is rubbing off on me.

—

THAT WEEKEND, A cold rain pelts the windows. Violet and I sit at the coffee table, coloring. Violet is scribbling across the page, without any regard for the predrawn outline of a raccoon in her coloring book. “Grandma likes to color inside the lines,” my daughter informs me. “She says it’s the right way.”

“There is no right way or wrong way,” I say automatically. I point to her explosion of reds and yellows. “Look how pretty yours is.”

Who came up with that rule anyway? Why are there even lines?

When Micah and I went on our honeymoon to Australia, we spent three nights camping in the red center of the country, where the ground was cracked like a parched throat and the night sky looked like a bowl of diamonds that had been upended. We met an Aboriginal man, who showed us the Emu in the Sky, the constellation near the Southern Cross that is not a dot-to-dot puzzle, like our constellations, but the spaces in between the dots—nebulas swirling against the Milky Way to form the long neck and dangling legs of the great bird. I couldn’t find it, at first. And then, once I did, it was all I could see.

When my cellphone starts to ring and I recognize Ruth’s number, I immediately pick up. “Is everything all right?” I ask.

“Fine.” Ruth’s voice sounds stiff. “I was wondering if maybe you had any free time this afternoon.”

I glance at Micah, who’s come into the living room. Ruth, I mouth.

He scoops up Violet, tickling her, letting me know that I have all the time I need. “Of course,” I say. “Was there something in the discovery you wanted to talk about?”

“Not exactly. I need to go shopping for a birthday gift for my mama. And I thought you might like to come along.”

I recognize an olive branch when I see it. “I’d like that,” I say.