Anthony sat for a long time with that knowledge. Lu had been right. Anthony had been Katherine Mansfield to Leonard Puckett’s Virginia Woolf.

“Did you talk about . . . what happened?” He lowered his voice like he was about to utter a curse in front of a child. “The plagiarism?”

“Only once. We had a big fight.” Dorothy paused, and in that pause Anthony thought he felt the very earth reverse its rotation. “We’re none of us exactly who we say we are,” Dorothy said finally.

That seemed like a non sequitur. Anthony considered his mother: his dear, familiar mother, with her stylish bob, and her lipstick, and her beautiful posture. Look at her even now, her legs crossed at the ankles. “You are,” he said. “You’re just exactly who you say you are.”

Dorothy sipped her coffee. There was something almost aggressive about her sipping, something combative. “There’s something I want to tell you,” she said. “I’ve been trying to tell you this all summer.” She stood and crossed the living room. She examined the crystal decanter, ran her finger along the rim of one of the glasses. “Really, in some ways, I’ve been trying to tell you your whole adult life. But I never could quite get up the nerve.” She turned back to Anthony, and there was something about the way she was looking at him—there was a shrewdness in her gaze, a clarity that made him take notice.

“What?”

“I always thought you’d figure it out on your own,” she said. She sat back down. She sat with her hands folded together, very politely, like a theatergoer waiting for the curtain to go up. Softly she said, “Think about it, Anthony. I know you’re not a thriller writer, but there’ve been clues all around you, all of the time, about your father, and about me.”

Anthony gasped. “Am I adopted?” It didn’t seem likely. He had his mother’s small ears, and his father’s nose.

“No,” she said. “But keep thinking.” She nodded encouragingly. It was the same way he’d seen her nod at Max when she was helping him sound out a word in one of his picture books. (They both particularly liked the one about the bear and the mouse who visited the library together.) “Where was your father, when he was writing?”

“In his study.”

“And where was I?”

Kitchen. Garden. Car. “A lot of different places.”

“Where was I when I wasn’t a lot of different places?”

Dorothy brought Leonard Puckett a scotch every day at five o’clock. Sometimes she put it on the desk and went back to the kitchen to make dinner, but sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she brought a glass of white wine in and closed the door. There was that stretch when he was in high school and she’d taken up knitting. She’d knit fifteen different blankets to donate to a homeless shelter; she’d knit baby hats to give to the hospital; she’d knit a sweater for Anthony that he’d never worn (he’d been in high school! Who wore a hand-knit sweater in high school?) and one for Leonard, which he did wear, though not in public. Where did she do the knitting? Not in the living room or in the easy chair in her bedroom or on the cushioned bench in the breakfast nook in the kitchen. No, she sat on the leather sofa in his father’s study.