A college fling who never knew.

A young man who had wanted to be involved and been pushed away.

In my gentler imaginings he was simply young and scared, as young and scared as Chloe had been.

In my darker ones he was a boy who had used her and moved on.

But in every single version, across ten years of wondering, he had been someone small, someone ordinary, someone on roughly the same footing as my daughter, two kids who had made a mistake.

Never once, in all those years, had I imagined this: a grown man of enormous power and wealth and public standing, decades her senior, who had preyed on an eighteen-year-old intern and then, when the consequences came, had used every advantage of his position to threaten and silence and try to erase her.