“Her second husband. Or maybe her third,” Wilma said. She paused, carefully avoiding Marya’s eye. The moment was oddly light, blurred; not so strained as one might imagine; served up as it was in the tacky old Royalton Café, at eleven in the morning, amid chatter from other tables—women shoppers, mainly, some with small children. (Marya realized belatedly that her aunt must have been humoring her, in agreeing to come here for coffee. She would have preferred one of the newer places, surely—the bustling coffee shop of the Ramada Inn, or that place up the street with the hanging plants and macramé and bare parquet floors.) “I think he was her third but I’m not certain of the details,” Wilma said defensively. “Word gets around, you know. Especially after that ad of yours ran. But you know Innisfail—you can’t always believe all you hear.”

Marya was staring at Wilma, who was busily buttering a croissant. She wanted to ask how long Wilma had known but she decided against it, the words might have struck the wrong note. Instead she said, laughing, weak, breathless, “My mother is alive, and she’s . . . living up in New Canaan County? And her last name is Murchison . . . ?”

Marya’s laughter was louder and sharper than she might have wished. But no one at the other tables seemed to hear—no one glanced around.

“Well,” Wilma said, slightly flushed, frowning, not yet meeting Marya’s eye, “you know I can’t vouch for any of this. It’s just something I heard. There was this girl in the hospital for kidney stones, hardly more than a girl, and somebody came to visit her that’s a cousin of your mother’s, and we got to talking one day, and she knew who I was, and it sort of came out. . . . As I say, though,” she repeated, her voice taking on an admonitory note, the half-chiding tone of the Wilma of long ago, “you can’t always believe all you hear. Especially from the Sanjeks.”

BUT MARYA DIDN’T drive up to New Canaan County the next morning.

She went home, back to her apartment in New York City, and waited a few days . . . and composed a letter . . . in truth, numberless versions of a letter. She thought about telephoning. (But hadn’t someone warned her about telephoning?) She thought, Now that I know the woman is alive, does anything else matter? Do I really care about seeing her?

She discovered that she was badly frightened.

She discovered that she didn’t know what she wanted; she hadn’t the faintest idea.

She felt, a dozen times a day, the need to telephone Eric—to ask him what to do.

Apart from Eric there was no one she could ask for advice, no one whose advice she valued. She imagined Wilma fixing her with a quizzical frown and saying, For Christ’s sake, Marya, why have you always taken yourself so seriously . . . ?