So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Thirteen. Raquel in a Post-Shaming World

A little boy and his father were eating breakfast at an almost deserted restaurant in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan when they became aware of a man dashing across the floor toward them. He seemed to have something urgent to say. The boy looked anxious at what might happen next. The stranger took a breath.

“STUDY HARD AT MATH!” he yelled.

There was a silence. “Okay,” the boy said.

At this, the man walked over to me and sat down, pleased to have had the chance to positively motivate a child. His phone rang. “Sorry,” he mouthed. He picked it up. “DID YOU DO TEN STRONG POWERFULS LAST NIGHT?” he hollered at the receiver. “WORD OF HONOR? GOOD FOR YOU! LOVE YOU, BYE!” He put the phone down. Then he smiled, delighted that this was proving to be such a gold-rush morning for him in terms of imparting inspirational messages.

—

His name was Jim McGreevey. He used to be the governor of New Jersey. He’d been a severe one too: “I never pardoned anyone,” he told me.

“How does the pardoning process even work?” I asked him.

“The attorney general’s office makes a recommendation,” he replied. “They contact the local county prosecutor, who contacts the parole officer of the person being considered for a pardon, who makes an official recommendation to the governor. Who was me.”

I pictured the prisoners in their cells, concentrating hard on their letters to Jim, frantically wondering how best to lay out their mitigating circumstances. What would draw Jim in? What would grab the attention of the governor?

“Can you remember any of their stories?” I asked Jim.

“I never read any of them,” he said.

“You never even looked?”

Jim shook his head.

“You were like a hanging judge,” I said.

“I was a law-and-order Democrat,” Jim said.

• • •

Bill and Hillary Clinton had campaigned for Jim back in 2001. He was young, handsome, and married, with two beautiful daughters. He won a landslide victory and took his place at the heart of the New Jersey power elite—“as close,” as he’d later describe the state in his memoirs, “to Machiavelli’s cutthroat Venetian principality as anywhere on Earth.” It was a place where “political meetings start with a big bear hug” so that each hugger could surreptitiously check the other for a concealed wire: “A New Jersey pat down among friends.” Now Jim had a beach house, a helicopter, a staff of cooks, and Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion.

Drumthwacket

Jim considered himself awesome. He was inviolable. This was just after 9/11. He’d turn up at places like the offices of the Bergen Record—North Jersey’s regional newspaper — and hold forth, lording over the journalists, making grand pronouncements like “We will not skimp on security. We’ve even employed a security adviser from the Israeli Defense Forces, probably the best in the world.” Then he’d swan off, thinking how well it had gone, unaware that the editorial board of the Bergen Record was now wondering why on earth the governor of New Jersey had employed a man from the Israeli Defense Forces to advise on local security.

• • •

When Jim was a young boy, he’d lie in his tent at summer camp and “think I was hearing people in other tents call me a faggot and then realize that they were.” Jim stirred his coffee. “It’s funny how these things just stay.”

“They really stay,” I said. “My life at fifteen and sixteen never leaves me.”

We looked at each other then — Jim and I — two middle-aged men in a coffee shop in New York City.

—

Jim grew up, went to Columbia University, and would some nights walk all the way down from 116th Street to the Meatpacking District to look into the windows of the gay bars. But he couldn’t bring himself to go inside and he’d walk back up to 116th Street.

He grew up to become an assistant prosecutor—“a prosecutor’s prosecutor”—and a town mayor. He read books on how to stop having gay thoughts. As a state assemblyman, he voted against gay marriage.

He lost his first election campaign for the governorship by just twenty-seven thousand votes (out of more than two million votes cast). When he was campaigning for the second time, he went on a diplomatic junket to Israel where he found himself at a lunch in some rural town. The man sitting next to him introduced himself. His name was Golan, he said, and he worked for the local mayor.

“I followed your campaign very closely,” Golan told Jim. “Twenty-seven thousand votes is a very narrow margin.”

Jim was, he’d later write, “flattered beyond anything I’d ever experienced before. Nobody commits to memory the demographic standings of a politician halfway around the world.”

Jim fell in love with Golan. He told him that if he came to New Jersey he’d give him an important concocted job title like “special counselor to the governor.” Golan agreed and, on his arrival in America, demanded an especially opulent office that had already been allocated to another member of Jim’s staff. Jim gave Golan the office.

• • •

A few weeks after Jim’s visit to the Bergen Record, the newspaper published a profile of the unexpected Israeli staff member, referring to Golan as a “sailor” (he had once been in the Israeli navy) and a “poet” (he’d written a collection of poems in high school). Jim feared they might be using code words, but he didn’t know for sure and he couldn’t talk to anyone about it. His staff was acting like nothing was different, but that didn’t mean nothing was different.

“People don’t say things to governors that they don’t think governors want to hear,” he told me.

—

Jim distanced himself from Golan. He told him he needed to quit his job for the good of the administration. Golan was devastated. He had envisaged a great career in U.S. politics and now Jim was throwing him on the fire to save his own career.

A few weeks later, a letter arrived for Jim. It was from Golan’s lawyer. Golan was threatening to sue Jim for sexual assault and harassment.

“When I got that letter, I had this vision of my grandmother’s china cabinet,” Jim told me. “And all the china was just smashing.”

—

After three years in power, it was over for Jim. He called a press conference. “I am a gay American,” he announced.

He confessed the affair, resigned the governorship, stepped off the stage, checked himself into the Meadows, an Arizona clinic, and was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder.

• • •

You met James Gilligan?” Jim said to me in the restaurant. “Oh, I love Gilligan. I love Gilligan.”

In fact, I had met James Gilligan at the very beginning of my journey — a few days after Jonah Lehrer had made his disastrous apology speech at the Knight Foundation lunch. Gilligan is in late middle age now, with the worried face and wispy hair and wire-rimmed glasses of the East Coast psychiatrist he is. I sat with him in the communal courtyard of his apartment in New York City’s West Village. He’s about the world’s best-informed chronicler of what a shaming can do to our inner lives, which is why he’s so opposed to its renaissance on social media. I wanted to learn how he came to make it his life’s work.

—

Back in the 1970s, Gilligan told me, he was a young psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. His days were spent “treating middle-class neurotics like you and me.” He was completely uninterested in the strange epidemic that was occurring within Massachusetts’s prisons and mental hospitals “of suicides and homicides and riots and hostage taking and fire setting and everything you can imagine that was dangerous. Prisoners were getting killed, officers were getting killed, visitors were getting killed. It was completely out of control during the entire decade of the 1970s. There was a murder a month in one prison alone, and a suicide every six weeks.”

Inmates were swallowing razor blades and blinding and castrating themselves and each other. A U.S. District Court judge, W. Arthur Garrity, ordered the Department of Corrections to make sense of the chaos by bringing in a team of investigative psychiatrists. Gilligan was invited to lead the group. He agreed, but he wasn’t enthusiastic. He assumed the perpetrators of the prison violence would be psychopaths.

“I’d been taught that psychopaths had just been born that way,” he said, “and that they’d only want to manipulate you so you’d get them a reduced sentence.”

He pictured them like they were another species. And that’s exactly how they seemed to him when he first went inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane.

“One of the first men I met had been a pimp in a slum area of Boston,” Gilligan said. “He killed some of his girls, and he killed other people. He killed several people in the community before he was finally arrested. So they put him in the Charles Street jail to await trial. And he promptly killed one of the inmates there. So they said, ‘He’s too violent to await trial in the jail. We have to send him to Walpole’—the maximum-security prison. And he killed someone there. And that’s when I met him. He looked like a zombie. He was mute, rather paranoid, not overtly psychotic but literally abnormal. Everybody was scared to death of him. I thought, This guy’s untreatable. But we needed to keep people safe. So we put him in a locked dormitory building, and during the day, I told the staff, ‘Keep an invisible wall around him. Keep six feet away from him. Don’t crowd him. If you crowd him, you might get injured.’”

And that’s how things remained for a while. But eventually the man — and other men like him — loosened up a little to Gilligan. And what they told him came as a great surprise to him.

“The men would all say that they had died,” Gilligan said. “These were the most incorrigibly violent characters. They would all say that they themselves had died before they started killing other people. What they meant was that their personalities had died. They felt dead inside. They had no capacity for feelings. No emotional feelings. Or even physical feelings. So some would cut themselves. Or they would mutilate themselves in the most horrible ways. Not because they felt guilty — this wasn’t a penance for their sins — but because they wanted to see if they had feelings. They found their inner numbness more tormenting than even the physical pain would be.”

Gilligan filled notepads with observations from his interviews with the men. He wrote, “Some have told me that they feel like robots or zombies, that their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords. One inmate told me he feels like ‘food that is decomposing.’ These men’s souls did not just die. They have dead souls because their souls were murdered. How did it happen? How were they murdered?”

This was, Gilligan felt, the mystery he’d been invited inside Massachusetts’s prisons and mental hospitals to solve.

And one day it hit him. “Universal among the violent criminals was the fact that they were keeping a secret,” Gilligan wrote. “A central secret. And that secret was that they felt ashamed — deeply ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed.” It was shame, every time. “I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed. As children, these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of the window, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their pimps. For others, words alone shamed and rejected, insulted and humiliated, dishonored and disgraced, tore down their self-esteem, and murdered their soul.” For each of them the shaming “occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent behavior in adulthood occupied an equally extreme end of the continuum of violent child abuse earlier in life.”

So they grew up and—“all violence being a person’s attempt to replace shame with self-esteem”—they murdered people. One inmate told him, “You wouldn’t believe how much respect you get when you have a gun pointed at some dude’s face.” Gilligan said, “For men who have lived for a lifetime on a diet of contempt and disdain, the temptation to gain instant respect in this way can be worth far more than the cost of going to prison or even of dying.”

And after they were jailed, things only got worse. At Walpole — Massachusetts’s most riot-prone prison during the 1970s — officers intentionally flooded the cells and put insects in the prisoners’ food. They forced inmates to lie facedown before they were allowed meals. Sometimes officers would tell prisoners they had a visitor. Prisoners almost never had visitors, so this was exciting to hear. Then the officer would say that the prisoner didn’t really have a visitor and that he was just kidding. And so on.

“They thought these things would be how to get them to obey,” Gilligan told me. “But it did the exact opposite. It stimulated violence.”

“Literally, every killer told you this?” I asked. “That the feeling of shame was what led them to do it?”

“It amazed me how universal it was,” Gilligan replied. “Over decades.”

“What about that pimp from Boston?” I said. “What was his story?”

“His mother had thought he was possessed by the devil,” Gilligan said, “so she did voodoo ceremonies and exorcisms in this totally black basement and he was scared to death. He’d shit his pants. He certainly was not loved in any normal sense. His mother had given him this negative identity — that Satan was inside him — so he behaved accordingly.” Gilligan paused. “It took some of them a while to confess it to me. It’s shameful to have to admit you feel ashamed. By the way, we’re saying the word feeling. The feeling of shame. I think feeling is the wrong word.”

It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a “feeling,” for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante’s Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice — absolute coldness.

— JAMES GILLIGAN, Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic

“And finally it struck me,” Gilligan said to me. “Our language tells us this. One of the words we use for overwhelming shame is mortification. ‘I’m mortified.’”

• • •

Their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood… Instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords.

As Gilligan had said this to me, I remembered a moment from Jonah Lehrer’s annihilation. It was when he was standing in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed trying to apologize. Jonah is the sort of person who finds displays of emotion extremely embarrassing, and he then looked deeply uncomfortable.

“I hope that when I tell my young daughter the same story I’ve just told you,” he was saying, “I will be a better person…”

“He is tainted as a writer forever,” replied the tweets. “He has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.” “Jonah Lehrer is a friggin’ sociopath.”

—

Later, when Jonah and I talked about that moment, he told me he had to “turn off some emotional switch in me. I think I had to shut down.”

Jonah had a house in the Hollywood Hills and a wife who loved him. He had enough self-esteem to get him through. But I think that in front of the giant Twitter screen he felt for an instant that same deadness that Gilligan’s prisoners had described. I have felt it too. I know exactly what Jonah and Gilligan meant when they talked about shutting down — that moment pain turns to numbness.

• • •

James Gilligan has led a distinguished life. President Clinton and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed him to sit on advisory committees on the causes of violence. Martin Scorsese based Ben Kingsley’s character in Shutter Island on him. But for all his accolades, I left Gilligan’s apartment thinking that he hadn’t considered his life’s work a success. There was a time when he might have totally changed the way the United States treated its transgressors. But it didn’t happen.

This is the reason why: Throughout the 1980s, Gilligan ran experimental therapeutic communities inside Massachusetts’s prisons. They weren’t especially radical. They were just about “treating the prisoners with respect,” Gilligan told me, “giving people a chance to express their grievances and hopes and wishes and fears.” The point was to create an ambience that eradicated shame entirely. “We had one psychiatrist who referred to the inmates as scum. I told him I never wanted to see his face again. It was not only antitherapeutic for the patients, it was dangerous for us.” At first, the prison officers had been suspicious, “but eventually some of them began to envy the prisoners,” Gilligan said. “Many of them also needed some psychiatric help. These were poorly paid guys, poorly educated. We arranged to get some of them into psychiatric treatment. So they became less insulting and domineering. And violence dropped astoundingly.”

Even apparently hopeless cases were transformed, Gilligan said. Even that pimp from Boston. “After he joined our program, he discovered a profoundly retarded eighteen-year-old young man. The boy could hardly tie his shoelaces. So he took care of him. He started protecting him. He’d take him to and from the dining hall. He made sure other inmates didn’t harm him. I was, ‘Thank God. This could be this guy’s road back to humanity.’ I told the staff, ‘Leave this alone.’ Their relationship built and matured. And he has a life now. He has not harmed a hair on anybody’s head in twenty-five years. He acts like a normal human being. He’s not going anywhere. He’s not normal enough to ever go back to the community. But he wouldn’t want to. He knows he couldn’t make it. He doesn’t have the psychological wherewithal, the self-control. But he has reclaimed a level of humanity that I never thought was possible. He works in the prison mental hospital. He’s useful to other people. And when I go back to visit, he smiles and says, ‘Hello, Dr. Gilligan. How are you?’” Gilligan paused. “I could tell you a hundred stories like that. We’d had men who had blinded themselves by banging their heads against the wall.”

—

In 1991, Gilligan began co-opting Harvard lecturers to donate their time to teach classes inside his prisons. What could be more deshaming than an educational program? His plan coincided with the election of a new governor, William Weld. Weld was asked about Gilligan’s initiative in one of his first press conferences. “He said, ‘We have to stop this idea of giving free college education to inmates,’” Gilligan told me, “‘otherwise people who are too poor to go to college are going to start committing crimes so they can get sent to prison for a free education.’”

And so that was the end of the education program.

“He literally decimated it,” Gilligan said. “He stripped it. I didn’t want to preside over a sham.” And so Gilligan quit.

As the years passed, he became for prison reformers a figure of nostalgia. Only a handful of therapeutic communities inspired by his Massachusetts ones exist in American prisons today. But, as it happens, one of them is situated on the top floor of the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. And it is being quietly run by the former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey.

• • •

The nontherapeutic lower floors of the Hudson County Correctional Center are drab and brown — like the ugly parts of a municipal leisure complex, a long corridor from a changing room to a swimming pool that will never be there. Down here is where New Jersey keeps its suspected immigration offenders. In November 2012 it was declared one of the ten worst immigration detention facilities in America, according to a Detention Watch Network report. Some of the guards down here reportedly called the detainees “animals,” and laughed at them, and subjected them to unnecessary strip searches. The report added: “Many immigrants also noted that corrections officers appeared to bring their personal problems to work, taking their frustration and anger out on them.”

—

“EVERY DAY IS A BLESSED DAY!” Jim hollered at a suspected immigration offender who was mopping the floor. The man looked startled. He smiled uneasily.

We kept walking — past inmates just sitting there, looking at walls. “Normal prison is punishment in the worst sense,” Jim told me. “It’s like a soul-bleeding. Day in, day out, people find themselves doing virtually nothing in a very negative environment.”

I thought of Lindsey Stone, just sitting at her kitchen table for almost a year, staring at the online shamings of people just like her.

“People move away from themselves,” Jim said. “Inmates tell me time and again that they feel themselves shutting down, building a wall.”

Jim and I walked into an elevator. An inmate was already in there. Everyone was quiet.

“Every day is a blessed day,” said Jim.

More silence.

“Watch your character! It becomes your destiny!” said Jim.

We reached the top floor. The doors opened.

“You go first,” said Jim.

“Oh, no, please, you,” said the inmate.

“No, you,” said Jim.

“Oh, no, you,” said the inmate.

We all stood there. The inmate went first. Jim gave me a happy smile.

The first time I’d met Jim — when he’d yelled “STUDY HARD AT MATH!” at a startled stranger child — I’d found him a bit nuts. But somewhere along the line he’d become heroic to me. I’d been thinking about a message that had appeared on the giant Twitter feed behind Jonah’s head: “He is tainted as a writer forever.” And a tweet directed at Justine Sacco: “Your tweet lives on forever.” The word forever had been coming up a lot during my two years among the publicly shamed. Jonah and Justine and people like them were being told, “No. There is no door. There is no way back in. We don’t offer any forgiveness.” But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don’t?

Amid all the agony, Jim McGreevey was trying an extraordinary thing.

—

In front of us was a giant locked dormitory room. Inside were forty women. This was Jim’s therapeutic unit. We waited for someone to let us in. It wasn’t like downstairs, Jim said; his women were “up at eight-thirty a.m. They all have chores. Everybody works. They’re all assigned physical tasks. Then there are workshops — on sex abuse, domestic violence, anger management — then lunch, then in the afternoon they focus in on job training, housing. There are books. There’s cake. There’s the library. Then the mothers can read bedtime nursery rhymes to their children over Skype.”

There were glimpses of a summer day through the windows, and as a corrections officer let us in, she said that tensions were high because warm days are when a person really feels incarcerated.

—

Jim gathered the women into a circle for a group meeting. I wasn’t allowed to record it and so I managed only to scribble down fragments of conversations like “I come from a small town so everyone knows where I am and that tears me up inside…” and “most people know why Raquel is in here…”

At that, a few women glanced over at the woman I took to be Raquel. Their looks seemed wary and deferential. Pretty much every woman here was in for drugs or prostitution. But the comment and the glances made me think that with Raquel it was something else.

Raquel’s eyes darted around the room. She fidgeted a lot. The other women were stiller. I wondered what Raquel had done, but I didn’t know the etiquette of how to ask. Then, as soon as the meeting broke up, Raquel immediately dashed across the room to me and told me everything. I somehow managed to get it all down — taking notes frantically like a secretary in Mad Men.

—

“I was born in Puerto Rico,” she said. “I was sexually abused from the age of four. When I was six, we moved to New Jersey. Every memory I have of growing up is a memory of being punched in the face and told I was worthless. When I was fifteen, my brother broke my nose. I ended up covered in blood. When I was sixteen, I had my first boyfriend. Three months later I was married. I started smoking pot, drinking. I cheated on my husband. I left him. Eighteen, nineteen was a big blur. I tried heroin. Thank God I don’t have an addictive personality. I drank like a fish. We’d go to bars, wait for people to come out, take their money, and make fun of how they screamed for their moms. Suddenly, holy shit, I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant with the only thing that’s ever going to love me. My son was born January 25, 1996. I went to business school, dropped out. I had a daughter. We moved to Florida. In Florida we’d have water fights, movie nights. I’d buy all their favorite food and lay it all out on the bed and we’d pile in and watch movies until we all passed out. We played baseball in the rain. My son loves comedy, drama, he sings. He won a talent show when he was fourteen. I would make him do his homework over and over. I used to make him do five-page reports, read encyclopedias. I shoved him out of the bed when he was fourteen and slapped him. A girl had texted him, ‘Are you a virgin?’ I was ballistic. I slapped the shit out of him. It left nail marks.”

—

Ten months ago Raquel had sent her children to stay with their father in Florida for a vacation. As she watched them walk down the tunnel toward the plane, her son suddenly turned and called back at her, “How much do you want to bet I don’t come back?” Then he said, “Just kidding.”

Raquel yelled back at him, “How much do you want to bet you don’t get on that plane?”

Her son walked on for a few more steps. Then he called back, “We should make that bet.”

“And that was the last thing he ever said to me,” Raquel said.

—

That Friday the Department of Children and Families turned up at Raquel’s house. Her son was accusing her of child abuse.

“He used to ask me if he could stay out until nine p.m,” Raquel said. “I’d say no. He’d ask why not. I’d say, ‘There are people out there that can hurt you.’ But I was hurting him more than anyone. Thank God they got away from me when they did. He’s safe. He’s getting the chance to be a teenager. He’s a very angry boy because I made him that way. My daughter is very shy, withdrawn, because I made her that way. I just pray they’ll be normal.”

—

For the first few months of Raquel’s incarceration she was downstairs on a nontherapeutic floor.

“What was that like?” I asked her.

“Downstairs is chaos,” she replied. “It’s borderline barbaric. Downstairs girls get slapped with the food trays. Some girl will decide she doesn’t like you. She’ll pull you into a room and lock the door and you’ll fight and whoever comes out unbroken wins. Up here we eat coffee cake. We watch TV. We spread books across the table. It’s like we’re in a college cafeteria sipping our coffee. Sophisticated!”

Just then there was commotion. A woman behind us had collapsed and was having a seizure. She was carried away on a stretcher.

“Feel better!” some of the other women shouted after her.

“Last call for medications,” an officer called out.

Jim and I left the prison and walked back toward his car.

“How long do you think Raquel will stay in prison?” I asked him.

“We’ll know more in two weeks,” he replied. “That’s when we’re due to hear from the prosecutor. My guess is a few more months.”

Jim said he’d pass on the news when he heard it. Then he drove me to the train station.

I didn’t hear from Jim two weeks later, so I e-mailed: “How did things go with Raquel?”

Jim e-mailed back. “She received difficult news yesterday. An eight-count indictment. She is in significant emotional pain.”

I telephoned him. “What are they charging her with?” I asked.

“Attempted murder in the first degree,” Jim replied. He sounded shaken. “She threw a knife at her son. They’re going for a twenty-year jail sentence.”

• • •

Six months later. Three people sat together in the council chamber at Newark City Hall: Jim, Raquel, and I.

Jim had intervened. The prosecutors were persuaded that Raquel was a victim of an “abuse cycle.” And so instead of twenty years she served four more months and then they let her go.

“If shaming worked, if prison worked, then it would work,” Jim said to me. “But it doesn’t work.” He paused. “Look, some people need to go to prison forever. Some people are incapable… but most people…”

“It’s disorienting,” I said, “that the line between hell and redemption in the U.S. justice system is so fine.”

“It’s public defenders that are overwhelmed and prosecutors that are following guidelines,” Jim said.

This has been a book about people who really didn’t do very much wrong. Justine and Lindsey, certainly, were destroyed for nothing more than telling bad jokes. And while we were busy steadfastly refusing them forgiveness, Jim was quietly arranging the salvation of someone who had committed a far more serious offense. It struck me that if deshaming would work for a maelstrom like Raquel, if it would restore someone like her to health, then we need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.

It wasn’t freedom without boundaries for Raquel. She’d been banned from contacting her children for five years. Her son would be twenty-two then, her daughter seventeen. “So even when she’s seventeen, any contact will have to be okayed with their father,” Raquel told me, “because my parental rights have been stripped.” But still, she gets updates. “My friends from Florida are still friends with them. My friend actually called me yesterday and said, ‘You will never guess who is Facebooking me right now.’ I said, ‘Who?’ She said, ‘Your daughter.’ I said, ‘No way!’ My daughter is sending her messages, and she’s sitting there reading them to me. So apparently my daughter has a little crush on someone. He’s got a cleft in his chin. He’s got sandy brown hair…”

I told Raquel it was nice to see her in such a good mood. And that’s when she told me her news.

“Yesterday, when group was over, Miss Blake called me into her office.”

Miss Blake was the manager of Raquel’s halfway house.

“She said, ‘Raquel, I’ve seen how you carry yourself, how the guys listen to you. I want to offer you a job here. Can you get me your résumé?’”

Raquel replied, “As luck would have it, I have a résumé right here.”

Then Raquel said, “Miss Blake, is this really happening?”

And Miss Blake nodded.

• • •

I got a call from Michael Fertik’s people. They were ready to start on Lindsey Stone.