She was on a side.

She had helped choose the seating chart, or at least she’d known and said nothing, and her only distress in the whole business was the fear that I might make it awkward.

She wasn’t trapped.

She was comfortable.

The trap had been mine — the story I kept telling to avoid seeing her clearly — and I had just, at last, walked out of it.

I don’t want to paint Lindsay as a villain from the start, because she wasn’t, and the truth is more sorrowful than that.