Shame

probably weren’t left alone for more than three minutes. When the guard returned, we were seated. No one ever suspected. But because I’m the only one who knows what happened, does that make it any less real?
    “I don’t believe anyone can ever really say, ‘I wasn’t myself.’ I’ve tried those words on myself, but they don’t fit. I know that what I did was the antithesis of professionalism. I know our being together was an unconscionable act. I was fully aware that this was a man who had murdered time and again, and he deserved no comfort, but I still wanted that intimacy between us.
    “We never talked about it. It was another secret your father took with him. I think it was a defining moment for me. Maybe what I learned was even worth all the shame I’ve had to carry.
    “I came to understand that lives can change in a single moment and that under certain situations people can do things that they would normally believe unimaginable. And I learned that everyone carries around secrets. Everyone. And these secrets, no matter if they’re great or small, shame us. I came to understand that all of us know things about ourselves that we don’t like to admit. Because of my own hidden shame, I became more attuned to ferreting it out in others.
    “Of course, it took time to learn those things. Now I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book. I wasn’t fair to Leslie Van Doren. I tried to make her pay for my sins. She was more honest about her love than I was. But I wanted to have my cake—wanted to be known as the noble poet survivor—and eat it too. So I lied to myself. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t love him, that nothing ever happened, and that just made everything worse.
    “Maybe now, though, both of us will be able to put our shame, and our Shame, aside.”
    Their hands came together, her left, his right, and their fingers intertwined like hands put together in prayer. They both shivered.
    “It’s cold,” said Elizabeth.
    Caleb shook his head. “We’ve just been clothed in our secrets for too long.”

38

    S OME RISE BY SIN, AND SOME BY VIRTUE FALL .
    —William Shakespeare,
    Measure for Measure
    One of my favorite characters in literature is the little boy who says of the emperor, “He’s not wearing any clothes.” When people ask me about my work, I recount that story and I say my job is often writing about the emperor’s new clothes.
    It was necessary for me to be that Hans Christian Andersen character throughout this book. I constantly asked myself what was real and what was false. I needed to be certain that my perceptions were based on truth, but in so doing I learned a hard lesson: sometimes we don’t know the naked truth even when we are looking at it. Certain revelations in this book were difficult for me, for I found that in the past I had contributed to the emperor’s new clothes, and though my fabric might have been invisible, my lies of omission were not.
    This is a story where things were never as they seemed. Take, for example, the names of the three central characters. As adults, none had the name they were born with. Lyle Guidry not only changed his name to Lola Guidry but also changed his identity from male to female. Caleb Parker was born Gray Parker Jr. Helost not only his first name but for the longest time the paternity of being a “junior” to an infamous serial murderer. And then there was John Farrell. He was born Gray Parker Van Doren, but he lost that name when he was adopted as an infant.
    There are two other characters in the book. I am one of them. In this book I am both narrator and participant. You will be the judge as to whether I told my part true or whether I again wove some fabric out of thin air.
    The other character, who was over two decades dead when this story begins, still managed to cast his long shadow throughout these pages. I have told Gray Parker’s story before, and I never imagined I would have to tell it again.
    But then our sins, and our shame, have a way of following us.
    —From the introduction to Elizabeth Line’s
    Shame Will Follow After

Acknowledgments

    I am grateful that there were so many individuals willing to assist in the writing of this novel. My heartfelt thanks go out to Norman R. Brown, Don “Cookie” DeWolf, Erica, Sherry Gerrish, Lori Gore, Master Chief Doug Gorham, Eric Hart, Lieutenant Gerry Lipscomb of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, Eugene Morris of the Florida Department of Corrections,