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“Excuse me,” she said. “My name is Norris, Lydia Norris.”

“Lead on, Ms. Norris.”

She took me down long wide halls that were carpeted and quiet. There were office doors that were mostly closed and very little foot traffic.

At the end of a cream-carpeted passage was a double doorway. Lydia pushed open the eight-foot-high, four-foot-wide doors and stood aside, gesturing for me to enter.

The office was wide and deep, with a curved window for the wall overlooking Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The carpet was dark brown and the oval desk was chiseled from a stone much like white slate.

There was a dark blue sofa with no back to the left. Jocelyn was sitting there wearing an emerald ensemble that might have been either a full-length dress or a pants suit—though it was most reminiscent of the new gliding suits that modern daredevils used to fly from precipitous mountainsides.

She stood from the sofa to greet me. Like many a woman cop, she was pretty short. Her facial features were boxy, but even still she had the unexpected beauty of Isabella Rossellini.

“Joe,” she said with a guilty smile.

“Jocelyn.”

“Come sit with me.”

I approached her and we shook hands. We were ex-cops, so hugging was pretty much out of the question.

“It’s good to see you,” she said when we were seated.

“I’m actually surprised that you let me up here.”

“Why would you say that?”

“The way you handled my investigation I figured you had me for some kinda masher deserved to be thrown under the jail.”

Her squarish, delicate face expressed pain. She looked away at her stone desk and then out into the sky.

“I am very sorry for what I did to you, Joe,” she said, bringing those wandering, lustrous brown eyes back to me. “The only reason I never called was because I didn’t think I deserved asking your forgiveness.”

“Uh…” I was at a loss for words to say the least, stupefied by the claim and its apparent honesty.

I had hated this woman for showing my wife the video of me and Nathali/Beatrice. I came here to confront her for participating in my frame. I was willing to fight the guy downstairs because I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, strike her.

“What?” she asked. “You thought I had something to do with what they did to you?”

“You—you showed that video to my wife,” I said. “She left me in Rikers when we had money for bail.”

Jocelyn was near my age, and I was slowly being convinced of her beauty. It was like the dawn of a morning after the death of a beloved king. Everything was beautiful but salted with the sorrow of his passing.

“I’m sorry for that too,” she said. “I believed that you’d raped that woman at the time. But even if it was true, there was no reason to show Monica that tape. Everything I did concerning your case was wrong.”

“Did you set me up?”

Jocelyn gave no assent. She just gazed at me like a land-bound midwestern farmer seeing the sea for the first time.

“You’ve thought that for the last ten years?” she asked.

“And more.”

“I heard they had you in solitary for three months.”

I brushed two fingertips across my scar.

“To keep from gettin’ any more like this,” I said.