Shame

these women ended up murdering family and friends, all in the name of love. Afterward, they wondered how they could have done such things. Some of them did their wondering in prison. Others in prisons of their own making. They looked at their emptied bank accounts and emptied lives. ‘It wasn’t me,’ they all wanted to say. ‘It couldn’t have been me.’”
    Just because Caleb had gone and made his confession to her, Elizabeth told herself, didn’t mean she had to feel obliged to do the same thing. This didn’t have to be quid pro quo. But her mouth kept moving, and the words kept coming out.
    “I set out to write that book,” said Elizabeth, “because I felt I was a club member in good standing. Some parts of the book were going to be autobiographical.”
    One part. One large part. The book was supposed to be her big catharsis. She had felt this need to tell, but when confronted with what she had done, she couldn’t do it. Elizabeth had thought there would be safety in numbers and that she could hide behind the shield of being blinded by love, but it had proved to be too personal. The telling was never done and the book never written.She had tried to mitigate and forget, and worst of all, she had tried to lie to herself.
    Caleb’s feeling of lightness met her gravity. He focused on her and saw her distress.
    “Elizabeth?”
    “The shame immobilized me for so long,” she said. “I’d read about rape and incest victims, and I’d empathize with them, but I knew that wasn’t fair because what happened to them wasn’t voluntary. With me it was. But our sense of shame wasn’t that dissimilar. Like many of those victims, I felt I couldn’t tell anyone.
    “Farrell had a right to be angry with me. Not to kill me, no, but he had a legitimate grievance. I didn’t just expose the story of Leslie Van Doren. I made it my vendetta. I wanted her to look unsavory and ridiculous. I wanted to lord my power and position over her. I didn’t want her to be only dirt; I wanted to grind her in that dirt.
    “You see, I was jealous of her, but I couldn’t admit that to myself. I made Van Doren and her ilk out to be the scum of the earth. I was oh so supercilious about those women carrying on relationships with prisoners. ‘Outmates’ I called them. The nuns of the iron bars.
    “I don’t know when I fell in love with your father. I think I only realized it a few weeks before he died. Even then, I knew it made no sense. I knew it was worse than wrong. This was a man who had murdered two of my sorority sisters, girls I was so close to. Because of what he did, because of his horrible, horrible acts, thousands of tears were cried on my shoulders, and I was forced to become intimate with the pain he’d caused to so many. I knew all about his dark side; no one had studied it as closely as me. And I knew how manipulative he could be. But none of that stopped me from falling in love with him.
    “If I look for excuses, I suppose I can find them. Our close proximity; his imminent death; his reciprocal, or so I wanted to believe, feelings. But nothing excuses what I did.
    “In my heart, I think he changed. I know there are those who say that men like him can’t change. I’ve read the psychological studies. They’d explain our relationship by saying I was this challenge for him, his full-time job while he was in prison, and that he used all his free time to figure out how he could inveigle his way into my affections. But it wasn’t like that, or at least I don’t think so.
    “We were in the lawyers’ room, with a guard outside, when there was this disturbance in the cell block. I don’t know the details—I never learned them—but the guard felt compelled to leave his post. He’d seen me in there hundreds of times with Gray, and he knew that Gray wasn’t a threat to me.
    “Sometimes I think I dreamed up what happened next. It seems unreal, implausible, and my memories are blurry. I might have gone to Gray, or he might have come to me, but I think we met in the middle. We started kissing, and the madness, and desperation, took both of us. I’d like to blame the fever of the moment. But I can’t. Our hunger was mutual. Everything happened so quickly I can almost pretend that nothing occurred, almost convince myself of that. Our physical union was so rushed it hardly qualifies as love making. I can count off the seconds and say, ‘There. That was nothing.’ But it was something.
    “As the clock ticked, we