My aunt was silent all this time and had been mostly so from the moment we had driven away from Newcastle, but now, at the sound of Mrs. Takahashi’s voice, she began to stir, opening her purse and removing a single small sheet of paper. She glanced up now but when Mrs. Takahashi did not step forward to retrieve the sheet she lay it faceup on the table and then returned to her rigid posture, seated at the front end of the sofa’s pad so that she seemed ready, at any moment, to flee.

She looked down briefly at the sheet. “That’s all I know,” she said quietly.

I could not see what the paper contained from where I sat and Mrs. Takahashi did not so much as glance at it on the table, keeping her eyes focused on the woman who sat stiff and upright upon her sagging sofa. Mrs. Takahashi continued to stand near the arched doorway that led into the kitchen.

I wondered at first if the two women would return to the strange idleness and prolonged silences that had marked my first visit to this living room, but then Mrs. Takahashi’s voice came, forceful despite its calm, thin sound: “You kept this from us for twenty-seven years,” she said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Wilson said simply. “You have every right to be angry with me.”

“Why did you come now? Why didn’t you just leave it quiet? We would never have known.”

“Because I wanted Raymond’s help.”

“Raymond’s help?”

“To find the child. I thought maybe the courts would open the record if Raymond asked them to. As the father, I mean.”

“Raymond?” Mrs. Takahashi’s voice, Kimiko’s, sounded distant and alone, as if in a different room.

“Yes,” Mrs. Wilson said. “That’s what I thought. And if he doesn’t want to help me, I can understand that. After what I did. Keeping it from him.”

“Raymond’s gone,” Kimiko said.

“Gone where?”

“He never came back from the war.” For a long moment Kimiko stood unmoving. No one spoke. I looked from her to my aunt and back again. Finally Kimiko mumbled, “Maybe something to eat,” and turned and stepped out of the room.

“Kim? Kim?” Evelyn said behind her, her voice rising in volume, on her feet now, following Mrs. Takahashi into the kitchen and me following dumbly behind them both as if I might offer some assistance. Mrs. Takahashi bustled around the small room, opening a cabinet and removing a tin of cookies and then retrieving a plate. “What do you mean, he never came back from the war?” Mrs. Wilson said.

Mrs. Takahashi looked at her now but said nothing, and after a moment she returned to the tin and opened it and began laying cookies upon the plate in the shape of a circle.

“My God,” my aunt said then. “I don’t understand it.”

“You don’t understand what?”