Kate shakes her head. “I feel as if I don’t recognize you anymore.”

“You’ve been pregnant before, but you had abortions. If it had been up to me, this woman would have, too.”

He makes an impatient gesture. Kate is demanding from him what seem to him unreasonable reparations—more, in fact, than the child’s mother has ever asked. Kate, in her woolly high-mindedness, is insisting that he admit this daughter into his life, after all these years, because she belongs there. Because she’s been wrongly excluded. She is the ghost of his old lostness, his former debauches, his miserable shy drugged efforts at promiscuity.

But Kate’s back where she started. “But why didn’t you tell me you had a child? I’ve told you about every boy I ever kissed, every time I ever fell off my bicycle. How could you hide something that huge? Didn’t you know I’d want to see a child of yours, that I hate it that I wasn’t able to have dozens of children with you?”

“I didn’t like the mother,” Gillem says finally. “I wouldn’t much want to know what came out of her. I wouldn’t feel especially connected to it. You know, genetics doesn’t feel very real to me, compared to what one puts into a child emotionally, culturally.”

“Well, that’s either ignorance or denial,” she snaps. “If you really believed that, we would have adopted. Hasn’t she tried to get in touch with you—the mother, I mean?”

“Not directly.”

“What, all that goes through Dickie?”

“It’s not something we talk about, especially. I see the transfers on my bank statements, that’s all. A few years ago, she asked for a hike in payments, I told Dickie fine. That’s it.”

“Has she ever married?”

“I gather not.”

Kate throws up her hands. “Look. The truth is—we both know it—this is something completely banal, run-of-the-mill. We both know loads of people this has happened to—suddenly these illegitimate children show up, or your mother tells you on her deathbed that actually your biological father is Winston Churchill, or whatever. It’s no big deal. This is not—er, The Scarlet Letter. But what you do have to face—”

“Easy, Kate. Why are you being so aggressive?”

“All right. But it happened. This poor child. And now, quite understandably, she wants to get to know you. It’s not her fault you decided her mother was trying to take advantage of you. Why should she be made some sort of nonbeing? It’s just—well, sex is wonderful and mysterious, and there are sometimes utterly unintended consequences that one has to accept. So now this child—your child—has come into our lives, and it’s up to us to welcome her.”

“Watch what you’re doing, Kate. I don’t want her in my life.”