When a kind, upstanding family man is misidentified as a rapist, he begins to wonder if his longtime community and friends will believe him or the accuser.

A businesswoman has her daughter edit her report for the next day because even though she’s eleven, she “excelled at things like that.” In the morning, the business meeting is cancelled because of a sexual assault investigation. The man accused is someone the businesswoman used to sleep with. Thinking of that makes her think of another man she used to sleep with, the numerous affairs she’s had. She “enjoyed the feeling of different lovers, the newness of strangers.” While she’s waiting for the interview, she checks on her daughters. She thinks about how they “were mystified by her English. It was one thing about her that seemed to both entertain and perturb them. They deployed her expressions to taunt her and the world at large. ‘I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice,’ they shouted at each other, at their dolls, at strangers on the street.” Her affair with the guy who’s being investigated had lasted three months. “[T]hey agreed…on the importance of seeking out risk and pleasure, and the joy of a temporary room with its own evolving rules.” She thinks about the other man she used to sleep with, how “[h]e was the lover she never would have turned away from.” But this guy, the guy who was her superior in the company, it seems she was not the only one who slept with him. Some of her female co-workers seemed affected by him too. And yet, he’d vouched for the businesswoman, even before their “brief affair, John had lauded her. He had argued for her to be further promoted, which would have meant a better salary, an easing of financial burdens, a three-bedroom apartment for the family, but she had been left to twist in the same position for ten years. Despite her tireless efforts, Lu had stayed near the bottom of the ladder.” The investigator tries to get her to blame the guy, but the businesswoman wonders, “Who was it who demanded shame? Fourteen years at the company. Where had all that time gone? Was John Sadler responsible for that?” She decides not to divulge anything. The man who’s being investigated calls her to apologize. She wonders what it means to be a mother, to be responsible for others when you want to be free. She looks at the questionnaire the investigator gave her. She tries to figure out how to answer it. Starts by writing, “I saw other woman grieving,” deletes that and then writes, “I never grieved.” She then writes in Cantonese, tries to answer why she had an affair. She thinks about having her daughter answer the questionnaire for her, but figures “[i]t was out of the question to ask the child. Was this something, after all, that a mother should do?” She ultimately writes, “Two people had an affair. Nothing more. But also nothing less.” The man who’s being investigated gets hospitalized. Nobody knows why. “Some people in the company pitied him, others didn’t.” His position gets filled by someone else. Life goes on. The businesswoman wants to tell her daughters that, that “[y]ou wanted to change [life] but it changed you, remodelled you for every age. One day, you were an immigrant, loaded down with inexplicable shame; the next you were middle-aged, a mother, and all the risks you’d taken—to live freely, to not be subdued—also made you feel ashamed, as if you’d done nothing but kick the tangerines around.” She realizes she may never understand how the world works. “She’d eaten from the bowl and turned it over; she had been unfaithful and yet faithful, wrong and yet right, lonely and yet beloved, and that was the bitter, that was the sweet quandry of it all.”

When a sexual assault takes place near his Minneapolis home, a young, expectant father’s desire for erotic violence is triggered, leading him to crave inflicting terror on women.

When a Southern California psychologist learns that her seemingly normal middle-aged client is a pedophile, she sets him on a morally dubious course of treatment.

A teenage girl is ensnared in a romantic relationship with her teacher at the same time her aunt's rapist, newly released, moves back into his house next to hers. When two teenage sisters discover a purse near the house of a recently released rapist, they begin to investigate their family's dark history of sexual assault, and a kindly English teacher turns out to more than he appears.

When the father of a college-aged girl, who works in a mail center and has taken to stealing her classmates' mail, comes to visit, he sexually assaults his daughter, as he has been doing since she was a young girl.

A woman on a grand jury hears the case of an older woman who was brutally raped by one of her former students. She attempts to understand the different ways the story disturbs her.

Disturbed by a past sexual assault on his wife, a man struggles through the day. His wife, however, turns hysterical and tells him not to act on it for the sake of their reputation.

A writer thinks about the not-so-fine moments of his career right before an exposé about his inappropriate conduct toward various women goes live.

A young college student makes a devastating choice after she is sexually assaulted.