I waited. When she saw I wasn't going to speak, Tamsin began, "Every woman in this group has been through a lot, and this therapy group is designed to help each and every one get used to being in social situations and work situations and alone situations, without being overwhelmed with fear. So what we say here is confidential, and we have to have your word that the stories you hear in this room stop in your head. That's the most important rule. Do you agree to this?"

I nodded. I sometimes felt the whole world had heard my story. But if I'd had a chance to prevent it, not a soul would've known.

"I've never had a group like this here in Shakespeare, but I've run them before. Women start coming to this group when they can stand talking about what happened to them - or when they can't stand their lives as they are. Women leave the group when they feel better about themselves. You can come as long as I run it, if you need to. Now, let's go to the therapy room and you can meet the others."

But before we could move, the phone rang.

Tamsin Lynd's reaction was extraordinary. She jerked and turned to face her desk. Her hand shot out and rested on top of the receiver. When it rang again, her fingers tightened around the phone, but she still didn't lift it. I decided it would be tactful to step around the desk and look at the clippings on the wall. Predictably, most were about rape, stalking, and the workings of the court system. Some were about brave women. The counselor's graduate and postgraduate degrees were framed and displayed, and I was duly impressed.

The manifestly intelligent Tamsin had picked up the phone and said, "Hello?" as though she was scared to death.

The next thing I knew, she'd gasped and sunk down into the client chair in front of the desk. I abandoned my attempt to look like I wasn't there.

"Stop this," the therapist hissed into the phone. "You have to stop this! No, I won't listen!" And she smashed the receiver into its cradle as though she was bashing in someone's head. Tamsin took several deep breaths, almost sobbing. Then she was enough under control to speak to me.

"If you'll go on next door," she said, in a voice creditably even, "I'll be there in a minute. I just need to collect a few things."

Like her wits and her composure. I hesitated, about to offer help, then realizing that was ludicrous under the circumstances. I eased out from behind Tamsin's desk and out the door, took two steps to the left, and went into another.

The room next door was probably a lot of things besides the therapy room. There was a large institutional table, surrounded by the usual butt-numbing institutional chairs. The room was windowless and had a couple of insipid landscapes on the walls as a gesture toward decoration. There were women already waiting, some with canned drinks and notepads in front of them.

My almost-friend Janet Shook was there, and a woman whose face was familiar in an unpleasant way. For a moment, I had to think of her name, and then I realized the formally dressed, fortyish big-haired woman was Sandy McCorkindale, wife of the minister of Shakespeare Combined Church, known locally as SCC. Sandy and I had clashed a couple of times when I'd been hired by the church to serve refreshments at board meetings of the SCC preschool, and we'd had a difference of opinion at the Ladies' Luncheon, an annual church wingding.

Sandy was about as pleased to see me as I was to see her. On the other hand, Janet smiled broadly. Janet, in her mid-twenties, was as fit as I was, which is pretty damn muscular. She has dark brown hair that swings forward to touch her cheeks, and bangs that have a tendency to get in her eyes. Janet and I sometimes exercise together, and we are members of the same karate class. I sat down by her and we said hello to each other, and then Tamsin bustled into the room, a clipboard and a bunch of papers clutched to her big bouncy chest. She had recovered quite well, to my eyes.

"Ladies, have you all met each other?"

"All but the latest entry," drawled one of the women across the table.

She was one of three women I didn't recall having met before. Tamsin performed the honors.

"This is Carla, and this is Melanie." Tamsin indicated the woman who'd spoken up, a short, thin incredibly wrinkled woman with a smoker's cough. The younger woman beside her, Melanie, was a plump blonde with sharp eyes and an angry cast to her features. The other woman, introduced to me as Firella, was the only African American in the group. She had a haircut that made the top of her head look like the top of a battery, and she wore very serious glasses. She was wearing an African-print sleeveless dress, which looked loose and comfortable.

"Ladies, this is Lily," Tamsin said with a flourish, completing the introductions.

I got as comfortable as the chair would permit, and crossed my arms over my chest, waiting to see what would happen. Tamsin seemed to be counting us. She looked out the door and down the hall as if she expected someone else to come, frowned, and said, "All right, let's get started. Everyone got coffee, or whatever you wanted to drink? Okay, good job!" Tamsin Lynd took a deep breath. "Some of you just got raped. Some of you got raped years ago. Sometimes, people just need to know others have been through the same thing. So would each one of you tell us a little about what has happened to you?"

I cringed inside, wishing very strongly that I could evaporate and wake up at my little house, not much over a mile from here.

Somehow I knew Sandy McCorkindale would be the first to speak, and I was right.

"Ladies," she began, her voice almost as professionally warm and welcoming as her husband's was from the pulpit, "I'm Sandy McCorkindale, and my husband is the pastor of Shakespeare Combined Church."

We all nodded. Everyone knew that church.

"Well, I was hurt a long, long time ago," Sandy said with a social smile. In a galaxy far, far, away? "When I had just started college."

We waited, but Sandy didn't say anything else. She kept up the smile. Tamsin didn't act as though she was going to demand Sandy be any more forthcoming. Instead, she turned to Janet, who was sitting next to her.

"Lily and I are workout buddies," Janet told Tamsin.

"Oh, really? That's great!" Tamsin beamed.

"She knows I got raped, but not anything else," Janet said slowly. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. She appeared to be concerned about the effect her story would have on me. Ridiculous. "I was attacked about three years ago, while I was on a date with a guy I'd known my whole life. We went out parking in the fields, you know how kids do. All of a sudden, he just wouldn't stop. He just... I never told the police. He said he'd tell them I was willing, and I didn't have a mark on me. So I never prosecuted."

"Next, ah, Carla?"

"I was shooting pool at Velvet Tables," she said hoarsely. I estimated she was approaching fifty, and the years had been hard. "I was winning some money, too. I guess one of them good ole boys didn't like me beating the pants off of 'em, put something in my drink. Next thing I know, I'm in my car buck naked without a dime, my keys stuck up my privates. They'd had sex with me while I was out. I know all of 'em."

"Did you report?" Tamsin asked.

"Nope, I know where they live," Carla said.

There was a long silence while we chewed that over. "That feeling, the need for vengeance, is something we'll talk about later," Tamsin said finally. "Melanie, would you tell us what happened to you?"

I decided that Tamsin didn't know Melanie that well, just from the timbre of her voice.

"I'm new to anything like this, so please just bear with me." Melanie gave a nervous and inappropriate giggle that may have agreed with the plump cheeks and pink coloring, but clashed with the anger in her dark eyes. Melanie was even younger than Janet, I figured.

"Why are you here, Melanie?" Tamsin was in full therapist mode now, sitting with her clothes arranged over her round form in the most advantageous way. She crossed her ankles, covered with thick beige stockings, and tried not to fiddle with the pencil in her clipboard.

"You mean, what incident?" Melanie asked.

"Yes," Tamsin said patiently.

"Well, my brother-in-law done raped me, that's why! He come to my trailer all liquored up, and he busted in my door, and then he was on me. I didn't have time to get my .357 Magnum, I didn't have time to call the cops. It was so fast you wouldn't believe it."

"Did the police arrest him?"

"Sure they did. I wouldn't leave the police station until he was in it, behind bars. The police tried to talk me out of it, said it was a family feud gone wrong, but I knew what I was doing and I know what he was doing, which was nothing I wanted him to do. His wife had told me he made her do it, too, when she was sick and didn't want to. They was married, so I guess she didn't feel like she could complain, but I sure could."

"Good for you, Melanie," Tamsin said, and I mentally echoed that. "It can be hard to stand up for what you know is right. Firella?"

"Oh. Well... I moved here from New Orleans about a year ago," Firella said. "I'm an assistant principal at the junior high school here in Shakespeare, and I had a similar job in Louisiana." I revised my estimate of her age upward. Firella was probably closer to fifty than to the thirty-five I'd originally assumed. "When I lived in New Orleans, I got raped at the school, by a student." Then Firella's lips clamped shut on the rest of her story, as if she'd given me enough to think about, and she was right. I remembered the smell of school, chalk and lockers and dirty industrial carpeting, and the silence of the building after the children had gone home. I thought of someone, some predator, moving silently through that building... .

"He broke my arm, too," Firella said. She moved her left arm a little as if testing its usability. "He knocked out some of my teeth. He gave me herpes."

She said all this quite matter-of-factly.

She shrugged, and was silent.

"And they caught him?"

"Yeah," the woman said wearily. "They caught him. He told them I'd been having sex with him for months, that it was consensual. It got really ugly. It was in all the papers. But the broken arm and the missing teeth were powerful testimony, yes indeed."

Tamsin cut a glance toward me to make sure I was absorbing the fact that I wasn't the only victim in the world who'd gone through an extraordinary ordeal. I've never been that egotistical.

"Lily, do you feel able to tell us your story tonight?" the therapist asked.

Fighting a nearly overwhelming impulse to get up and walk out, I forced myself to sit and consider. I thought about Jack's nose, and I thought about the trust the other women had extended to me. If I had to do this, it might as well be now as any other time.

I focused on the doorknob a few feet past Tamsin's ear. I wished that some time in the past, I'd made a tape recording of this. "Some years ago, I lived in Memphis," I said flatly. "On my way home from work one day, my car broke down. I was walking to a gas station when I was abducted at gunpoint by a man. He rented me to a small group of bikers for the weekend. That was what he did for a living. They took me to a - well, it was an old shack out in the fields, somewhere in rural Tennessee." The fine trembling began, the nearly imperceptible shivering that I could feel all the way to the soles of my feet. "There were about five of them, five men, and one or two women. I was blindfolded, so I never saw them. They chained me to a bed. They raped me, and they cut patterns on my chest and stomach with knives. When they were leaving, one of them gave me a gun. He was mad at the guy who'd rented me to them, I can't remember why." That wasn't true, but I didn't want to explain further. "So the gun had one bullet. I could have killed myself. I was a real mess by then. It was real hot out there." My fists were clenched, and I was struggling to keep my breathing even. "But when the man who'd kidnapped me came back - I shot him. And he died."

It was so quiet in the room that I could hear my own breathing.

I waited for Tamsin to say something. But they were waiting on me. Janet said, "Tell us how it ended."

"Ah, well, a farmer, it was his land, he came by and found me. So, he called the police, and they took me to the hospital." The condensed version.

"How long?" Tamsin asked.

"How long did they keep me? Well, let's see." The shivering increased in intensity. I knew it must be visible by now. "Friday afternoon and Friday night, and all day Saturday, and part of Sunday? I think."

"How long before the farmer got there?"

"Oh! Oh, sorry. That was the rest of Sunday, and Monday, and most of Tuesday. Quite a while," I said. I sat up straighter, made my fists unclench. Tried to force myself to be still.

"I remember that," Melanie said. "I was just a kid, then. But I remember when it was in all the papers. I remember wishing you had had a chance to shoot them all."

I flicked a glance at her, surprised.

"I remember thinking that you were asking for it, walking after your car had broken down," Firella said. We all looked at her. "That was before I found out that women had a right to walk anywhere they wanted, with no one bothering 'em."

"That's right, Firella," Tamsin said firmly. "What's the rule, people?"

We all waited.

"Don't blame the victim for the crime," she said, almost chanting.

"Don't blame the victim for the crime," we chorused raggedly. I thought some of us got the idea better than others, judging by their expressions.

"Baby-sitter accepts a ride home with the father of the kids, he rapes her. Is she at fault?" Tamsin asked us fiercely.