The Takahashis had lived all those years under a falsehood so thick that even Evelyn Wilson’s arrival in San Jose was in part in answer to its shape. But of course she did not know that either. Mrs. Wilson had reached a kind of tipping point of personal desperation and loneliness that finally pushed her to the desperate act, those twenty-seven years later, of tracking down her former tenants. It was the end of a long trail of grief and guilt that had been working upon her heart for a quarter century and without which she might well have kept all of it a secret forever. But there was the date that came back around on the calendar once a year, a date seared into the flesh of her heart, January 4, a date so increasingly fraught with emotional resonance that she began to fear the turn of the year, her mood darkening the closer she came to the holidays and the anniversary of that day in 1943 in Seattle when she had handed the child to a nun and said the words that she would remember all her life—“He’s yours now. Take him away”—and the nun nodding in her calm, quiet way, the papers pale and dry in her hand, and Evelyn signing them without even looking and without any sense that she had overstepped her authority at all, for was she not still the matriarch of that family? Was it not still her responsibility to make those difficult decisions?

After it was done and the papers were signed and the child, the swaddled child, was taken away, she returned to her sister’s house, that small worn structure with its scrim of dark mold along the edges of its rain gutters, the forest all around so perpetually wet and dripping that the very sight of it made Evelyn’s skin crawl. In her moment of extremis she had known that Dottie was the only person in the world whom she could truly trust, but now that the birthing was complete, the papers signed, the half-breed baby gone from their lives forever, she could not help but feel a gray loneliness that seemed to drip from the very trees, puddling even in the sodden light of ­Dottie’s kitchen.

“Is it—” her sister began, and Evelyn interrupted her: “Yes, it’s done.”

Dottie nodded. “You want some coffee?” She stood in the doorway that led to the kitchen, her thin body wrapped in an apron, hands patting the fabric.

And then came a reaction Evelyn did not expect, her knees wobbling and her whole body seeming to drain of vitality all at once so that she had to grasp the doorframe to keep herself from crumpling to the floor.

“You come and sit,” her sister was saying to her now, her hands on Evelyn’s frame, her fingers seeming to hold her together.