THE SUN had set by the time Cooper and Veena got on I-76 and headed back to Philly. It was rush hour but everyone was leaving the city, so they hit very little traffic. It seemed like someone had turned down the volume of the world. Philadelphia was cold and quiet.
“You going to tell that prick DA about this?”
“No,” Veena said. “Not about little Archie, anyway. You telling Francine’s lawyer?”
“Pretty sure she knows. Starting to think she hired me for window dressing. ‘We got the best, Your Honor,’ and so on.”
“So we finally know the truth.”
“Yeah, we do.”
“We should be happy about this.”
“We should.”
“So why does the truth feel so horrible?”
Cooper drove in silence, mostly because he knew the answer to that question. A lot of people thought that life was a struggle between virtue and temptation, angels and devils, good and bad. But that wasn’t the case. The truth was, life was often a choice between bad and worse. Neither of those options felt good, but human beings were compelled to choose, hoping everything would turn out okay despite all evidence to the contrary.