“I think they’re engaged!” Dolly said. “They’d had a fight, that’s all, and she realized she was wrong. At least, that’s what I gathered before I left.”

“So he’s gone?” Corinne said. “He just got here. Not two weeks ago, now, was it?”

Dolly drew in a breath. “Yes, well, he never planned to stay very long. He was upset about the fight he’d had with Helen, and he needed a place to go, that was all. And then when she came to apologize, he had no reason to stay.”

Mrs. Fryt shook her head, as if to say, What did you expect? “Helen, is it? From college, you say?”

Dolly nodded.

“Well, one thing I can say is, unlike his father before him, at least he didn’t lose his smile in the war. He seemed almost cheerful!”

Dolly felt her bones turning to water. Helen!

“And the rumors about his drinking,” Mrs. Fryt went on. “Well, he seemed sober to me. And you ladies will like to know: I asked him about Wilma. He said she was fine.” Mrs. Fryt sighed. “I suppose that family has just gotten used to her. I suppose they had no choice.”

“Mother,” said Jeannette.

Mrs. Fryt gave her daughter an innocent look. “I’m only saying, when a woman tries to burn down her own house, you just know she isn’t in her right mind!” She sniffed, and went back to her stitching.

“Now, Cecilia,” said Thelma. “Look what she’d been through.”

“Oh, yes, none of us had to endure such things,” Mrs. Fryt sneered. “As I always say, it’s a good thing I was home at the time, or she just might have succeeded. I suppose it was none of my affair, but I couldn’t just sit back and watch her destroy the place, after all those years. You could look in her eyes and just see she’d gone mad. And then, a couple days later, she was gone. Off to college to study the piano! If you can believe it.”

Dolly swallowed. Her heart rate was finally slowing. “Really?”

“She cut herself off from John and used the money her father had left her when he’d died years earlier. It was quite a lot, as I understand it, and she’d never breathed a word of it to John. Her father’s bank had handled it all those years. Can you believe the nerve?”

“Well, she never would have left, if he hadn’t had the affair,” Dolly objected.