She heard me out—patiently, though also, I felt, somewhat unwillingly. She was fond of Marco: I knew that, just as I knew that the convolutions of an Englishwoman like Julia Gault were unlikely to engage her sympathies. At first I put her slight air of impatience down to a reluctant but growing conviction that Marco had in fact committed a grave wrong. But I was mistaken. It was apparently Julia’s role in the story, not Marco’s, that troubled her. Julia’s revisions of her own feelings about the past, far from conveying a complicated authenticity (as they had for me), struck her as highly suspicious. The candor that I’d found so compelling merely seemed expedient to her. That absurd lie about Marco’s “banishment” was plainly damning, while the phone call the next morning was self-evidently manipulative:

“She must have realized she’d overplayed her hand. That’s all that was about. She was just trying to get you back on her side . . .”

I didn’t entirely disagree with her, and yet I felt an obligation to play devil’s advocate.

“You don’t think she could have been telling the truth about the other stuff, even if she was lying about that?”

Caitlin shrugged. “She’s someone who lies. What else is there to say?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was by her verdict. I knew from her policy with our children that she had no tolerance for lies, so perhaps I should have foreseen that she’d react the way she did. And it’s possible I had foreseen it in some way—that I was counting on her to give me the permission I couldn’t quite give myself, to put Julia’s accusations into a permanent moral quarantine, and continue my friendship with Marco as if nothing had changed.

At any rate, the conversation brought a change of mood that continued through the weekend. I felt calmer, less inclined to torment myself about possible ulterior motives for what I did or didn’t believe about Marco, and increasingly able to think of my coming reunion with him that Sunday without misgivings.