“Even though I was writing him to tell him I still loved him, I didn’t hear from him after that last summer. It hurt me deeply—I thought he didn’t realize how much he meant to me. I started reading science books so I’d know how he was thinking, and I came to change my own mind about the creation story. I joined the Methodist church, which made our parents furious, and I wrote about it to Matt, but I never heard back from him.”

She swallowed some cold coffee; Simone, looking over, brought a fresh cup without saying anything. “When I got married the next year, my husband, Gardiner, he drove me over so I could talk to the people Matt had been studying with. They told me he’d gone off doing secret work for the government and they didn’t know how to reach him.”

Her mouth was set in that smile you make when you’re trying hard not to cry. “I’m five years older now than my mother was in 1983. Aging changes you, makes you realize how many things are more important than religion or ideology. Or made me realize—I don’t think my mother and father ever realized that. My husband and I lost the farm in 2007, and then I lost my husband to cancer in 2011. I can’t imagine turning away my own children because they believed something different than me, but my mother even burned all the pictures we had of him. I managed to save a few. That picture you put on Facebook, whoever painted that knew him pretty well—it looks just like him, like he did that last Christmas he was home.”

“Did you know he was in love? I think he and his girlfriend had a baby girl, although I’m not a hundred percent sure just yet.”

Charmaine’s eyes widened in her sorrowful face. “A baby? What happened to her? Where are they?”

“I don’t know, but the girlfriend died in a car crash about two months after the baby was born. And I think your brother and the baby died at the same time.”

Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. First Gertrude Perec, then Charmaine Chastain Long. I was having a wonderful effect today on the women around me.

She wept silently, but finally said, “If he’s dead, where was he buried? And the baby?”