Free No One You Know by Michelle Richmond Page B

about their affair, had always bothered me. But Thorpe’s narrative had been so forceful, and so widely accepted as truth, that I had not trusted my own misgivings.
    “Here’s the funny thing,” McConnell said. “If you tell me about a bridge you want to build—where you’re going to build it, what materials you’re going to use, the depth of the river—I can tell you exactly, to the most minute fraction, how much weight it can handle. But I’ve never been able to apply the same rigor to my own life. I failed to recognize how much Margaret would endure before she took my son from me. I simply counted on her—not her love, but her desire to have a certain kind of life. I believed that there was nothing she wouldn’t overlook.”
    I listened for a false note in his voice, watched his face and hands for some twitch or subconscious gesture that might indicate that he was lying. There was a part of me, I realized, that wanted to believe everything he said. If Lila had really loved him—and I saw now how she could have, I understood his charm—I did not want him to be the person who had taken her life. Was the very nature of the village itself to blame? I’d never been superstitious, but I was beginning to feel as if I were under the influence of some strange spell.
    “Thorpe’s book,” I said. “I read it twice, cover to cover.”
    “Really?” McConnell said, looking at me with an unnerving intensity. “Then you know that Thorpe proved nothing. His accusations against me were purely conjecture. He could not find a single piece of physical evidence linking me to the crime. Not a single eyewitness. When I read it, I was furious. All I could think about was how offensive Lila would have found it—the lack of precision, the leaps in logic dismissed in a single sentence.”
    “You were the most probable choice.”
    “Probability is a strange thing,” McConnell said. “In terms of evolution, an instinct for probability should be built into our brains as a way of avoiding danger, but the reality is that most people are terribly inept when it comes to calculating probability. Our running into one another, for example, might at first glance seem totally improbable. But you’re a traveler, I’m an exile, and Diriomo isn’t all that far off the beaten path. In general, people want to believe that the world is safe. Random acts of violence make them feel unsafe. Therefore, when someone is murdered, the initial instinct is to blame someone close to the victim, despite the fact that probability dictates that all of us come in close contact with dangerous individuals on a regular basis.”
    “What about the math problem?” I asked. “Goldbach. What about Thorpe’s suggestion that the two of you were getting close to solving the problem, and you didn’t want to share the credit.”
    “Close to proving it,” he corrected me. “But that’s ridiculous. We were nowhere near. Thorpe didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t give up on it, though. After I moved here, I spent most of my free time working on it. It was soothing, something to pass the time. More than that, I’ll admit, the Goldbach Conjecture reminded me of Lila. It was a pact we’d made with one another, that we would once and for all prove it. I felt so guilty after she died. Whatever happened to her, I hadn’t been there for her. I should have driven her home that night after dinner. But I didn’t, because we had stayed out too late, and I needed to get home to my son. He wouldn’t fall asleep until I tucked him into bed. So I walked her to the Muni station. Every day, I live with the fact that I failed her.”
    The rain was coming down hard, thrashing the trees outside and making everything smell earthy and green. Because the room had no air-conditioning, I had left the window open. A screen kept out most of the rain, but a few drops splashed onto the floor beneath the window.
    McConnell leaned forward. His chair scraped against the