My mother called at 2:07 a.m. and said, “You can c…

Daniel’s laugh carried out when the door opened briefly and shut again. I took one breath, then another, and got out. When I stepped onto the porch, I smelled rosemary, roasting meat, and the sharp clean scent of furniture polish.

Mom opened the door before I knocked, like she had been watching for me. She looked me up and down once. “Well,” she said, stepping aside, “at least you listened.”

And the way she said it, like I had arrived pre-corrected, like I was an inconvenience that had thankfully chosen to behave, made something cold slip into place inside me.

I walked in anyway. I still didn’t know that by the end of the next few hours, a federal judge would look straight at me across that polished table and crack open every lie my family had built. But standing there in the entryway, with the smell of garlic and wax and my mother’s perfume crowding the air, I already had the strange, prickling feeling that the night was leaning toward something sharp.

Then Daniel came around the corner grinning, wineglass in hand, and said, “Please, for once in your life, try not to make this weird.”