“Are you hungry?” Mrs. Wilson said from the passenger seat. “Let me buy us dinner.”

“Why are we here?”

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m feeling peckish.”

What I wanted more than anything was to shift the car into park, open its door, and simply walk away. I knew, I think, that what would come next would be the truth, and yet, perhaps strangely, I did not know that I wanted to hear it. I had already agreed not to tell Mrs. Takahashi, not even to tell my grandmother, and so were Mrs. Wilson to tell me the next piece of the story I would become complicit in her lie, in her secret. I already was.

But in the end I followed her into the quiet interior of the diner with its muted sounds of cutlery and its warm savory smell of grease and meat and potatoes, and I sat and listened to Mrs. Wilson, to her admission which was also tinged with the steadfast belief that she was, that she had been, in the right to do what she had done.

“She was eating with her beau,” Mrs. Wilson told me.

“Helen was?”

“Yes, Helen,” she said. “I don’t know where in the restaurant but let’s say it was right here at this table. I wasn’t here, you understand. I was at home, but Helen told me all about it. You bet she did.”

“I thought you said she wouldn’t talk to you afterwards.”

“No, that was a bit later, but I could tell it all came from that night. She was so upset, John. Just hysterical, really. It took me several hours to calm her down.”

“What happened?” I asked her then. I had ordered a chicken-fried steak and the waitress set the thick white plate upon the table before me, asking us if there was anything else and then disappearing to other tables and other customers.

“Well, like I said,” Mrs. Wilson told me then, “Helen was eating with her beau.”