We took Anthony’s mother out to dinner. The restaurant she chose was dark with heavy olive-colored curtains and wood beams, a steakhouse. She ate an entire steak, and a baked potato, and a salad with ranch dressing. Her body seemed too small for such a meal, but she ate steadily and doggedly until every bite was gone.

She alternated between defending him and insulting him.

“I washed my hands clean of him long ago,” she said.

She ordered cheesecake for dessert.

“He’s been claiming to be someone else,” I said. “He gave us a fake name.”

“Why am I not surprised!” she said, then immediately put down her fork and looked at me angrily. “His life hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses. Unless you’ve been kissed by tragedy, you wouldn’t understand. But we were kissed by tragedy many times over.”

I watched her eat the cheesecake. She seemed to derive zero pleasure from the act, but she kept at it. When the slice of cake was gone, she scraped her fork along the plate and ate the last crumbling remnants she’d collected.

“I would lie about my name, too, if I abandoned my wife,” she said. “I’d be too embarrassed.”

Here was one more person with a private grief so large and ungainly she could barely contain its bulk.

“Strange question. Did he ever mention my mother?” I asked her.

“I don’t know your mother, so.”

“Did he ever talk about someone named Cecily?”

She had just lifted a cup of coffee to her lips, but now she set it down and the liquid sloshed over the edge onto the tablecloth. “Yes, he talked about someone named Cecily,” she said. “But I don’t think that could have been your mother. Cecily was a friend he made as a teenager.”

I leaned toward her across the table, feeling a swirling sensation, that terrible dizziness of discovery. “But it could have been my mother. I mean Cecily isn’t a very common name.”

“No,” she said. “That doesn’t make sense. How would he meet your mother? We were only there—we stopped vacationing that year. Cecily. Cecily was a girl. I’m trying to remember, but—I’m sure of it.”

I felt certain that this was proof he had known my mother. I tried to imagine how they met. I pictured my mother grocery shopping, checking out books from the library, sweeping into yoga class, meditating at the end of the dock, draining spaghetti. Where in that life was there room to befriend a teenage boy?

“When did you vacation on Wolf Island?” I asked.