I was angry at my father for keeping the secrets of my mother’s family, my family, during all the years of their marriage and its aftermath.

“It was your mother’s secret,” he said. “Not mine.”

“But you knew she was out there somewhere…you probably knew better than anyone how hard it must have been for her in that family.”

“You have to understand,” he said. “Your mother never talked about her. Never.”

“You never asked? You didn’t think it was unnatural?”

“Your mother isn’t a very sentimental person,” he said. “You know that.”

He’d once tried to explain some of the differences that had dissolved their marriage. “Your mother always wanted me to do more,” he said, “and I always wanted her to feel more. That was most of it.” He was full of brief statements about his own identity: “I am made of emotions. Emotions are my biggest addiction.” He told me I could break his heart with a single cruel word. I reported this to my mother.

“I bet you could,” she said, and I heard a note of satisfaction in her voice. She was different. She didn’t depend on anyone. It seemed that other people’s needs slid smoothly off her body, naturally and inevitably repelled, like beads of water coursing off an oily frying pan in the sink.

Tom didn’t understand why I was so upset about Matilda. “What’s the big deal with Mom not telling you?” he asked.

“It’s not about my knowing,” I said. “It’s not about me at all. I just wonder who deserves to get cut off from every—”

“Maybe it was Matilda’s fault,” he said. “Have you thought of that? You don’t know anything about her.”

Tom wasn’t callous, but he believed people controlled their own destinies. You make what happens next, he liked to say. I felt like “next” was something that happened all over me. I never thought I could shape it between my fingers like putty.

You could see the sculpture of Tom’s life as something he’d carved. He’d spent his twenties making money in private equity. He’d left his big bank for a smaller boutique firm where he’d have more control over the cash. “If something goes wrong, it’ll be on me.” There was more pride in his voice than fear. He never had patience for things that didn’t happen and people who didn’t make them happen. Matilda was a person who hadn’t happened. At least she hadn’t happened to him. But now I felt, without being able to explain it, that she was happening to me.

I knew she must have been pretty, like my mother, maybe she still was, and this became part of my imagining. I conjured exotic lives and stuck the paper doll of her imagined body inside them: coastal mansions, distant jungles, cabaret shows in seedy strip malls. It did not matter where she was, only that her face glowed, luminous.

*   *   *