Excerpt from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I gave my name at the front desk and Grayson called me into his warm, windowed office. The room was spotless. In contrast to the sloppy weather, Grayson sat at his desk with perfect posture in an immaculate suit. He smiled amiably and gestured for me to sit on a mesh chair so deliberately ugly it must have been expensive. Too late, I noticed that my blouse had a hole in the elbow, so I sat with my hands tucked into my lap, ankles crossed like I was in finishing school. I had never been fired before, and wondered how to sit in a way that would make him regret his decision.

But it turned out Grayson had a new case for me. He rolled his chair forward and consulted his yellow legal pad. "It's rape. College rape, gang rape. That okay with you?"

Involuntarily I shook my head, which I converted into a vigorous nod.

Grayson told me about the client, Simone Baker, raised in a tiny town on the eastern plains. Her mother worked a desk job and her father ran cattle and raised horses. The family chose Grayson to represent them because he had been wearing cowboy boots when they met.

In high school, Simone had been part of the National Honor Society and she taught Sunday school. While attending the university full-time, she worked thirty hours a week, Big Sistered a foster-home teenager, and spent a summer doing refugee relief work overseas. I had never met anyone that uniformly virtuous. I wondered if she was real.

Grayson said, "Over a year ago, on December seventh, 2001, Simone was hosting a girls-only party at her apartment when twenty college football players and recruits unexpectedly showed up at her door. She was drunk, so she went to lie down. At least five and as many as eight of them followed her into the bedroom. Several of them allegedly raped her while the others surrounded the bed as spectators. It was too dark to see well, so she doesn't know who her attackers were."

What a terrible story. I wondered what it was like to not know your attackers—if it was a relief, or if it made everyone on earth feel dangerous.

Grayson said, "We may be able to sue the university under Title IX. You went to school there, right? Is that a conflict of interest for you?" I shook my head. I had gotten my master's degree in English at that university, but all my favorite professors were gone.

Grayson said, "I'm making an argument for a rape culture. We're going after the system, not the individuals. There's no Title IX precedent for a sexual assault lawsuit of this kind. It's new legal ground." Grayson tugged the edges of his smile downward with a thumb and forefinger, trying not to appear proud and excited.

Excerpted from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse. Copyright © 2022 by Erika Krouse. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.