“She was so young. And I didn’t know what she’d do if she saw him again. I was afraid she’d fall right back into his arms. I don’t expect you to understand but I thought Helen would, maybe not at first but certainly after she had her own children. I thought she’d understand then at least.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Had you asked me that a few months ago I might have said no. Now I’m just not sure. It’s a strange feeling to have no family. I don’t even know where my daughter lives anymore. Last time I wrote her the letter was returned. Not at this address. Phone disconnected or changed. No forwarding number. Not in the phone book. It’s like she just disappeared.”

“Like Ray,” I said.

And now she looked at me and the expression that passed over her face was like a thousand clouds at once. The youth I had seen before was gone now and in its place stood every moment of her sixty-nine years, a woman who was, I realized, broken by all the decisions she had ever made.

“Come on,” I told her. “It’s getting late.”

“John.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

FOR THE REST OF THAT SUMMER I returned to the relative mundanity of my days before Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi had entered my life. I thought often of calling Ray’s mother to tell her what I had learned, but each time something held me back, not a sense of loyalty to family or to race but perhaps simply the knowledge that what I had learned did not amount to much at all. He had been run off the property and did not return. Still, I wondered why Mrs. Wilson had chosen to tell me, to tell anyone at all, since she had very nearly gotten through Mrs. Takahashi’s visits without any of it being known. And really what did it matter now that she had told me? Was it such a great secret in the end? After all of it, no one really knew what happened to Raymond Takahashi and yet Mrs. Wilson had even kept what little she had known a secret, allowing the boy’s mother to make the drive not once or twice but six times in all, allowing her to trace the ghosts of a history that was obfuscated by Mrs. Wilson herself. Help me, Evelyn, Mrs. Takahashi had said. Perhaps it was simply loneliness, that she might have clung to Mrs. Takahashi in the emptiness of her final decades, their lives inexplicably re-entwined amidst the ghosts of a past the repercussions of which continued to reverberate well into whatever future was yet to come.