“You think I don’t have any pride?” Edie said, her jaw set.

Inga leaned back and opened her mouth in disbelief. “You think this hasn’t hurt my pride?” She looked baffled for another second and then said, “Maybe that’s the problem. He threw himself at you, and you rejected him, but I wanted him so much. I always wanted him.” Inga’s voice cracked.

“I was in bad shape back then. I’m clean now. I . . . I found myself.”

“whatever that means,” Sonia said abruptly. “I hear that all the time. You’d think there were selves lying all over the place just waiting to be picked up.”

Edie ignored her.

As I listened, I realized that Edie Bly was at a disadvantage with her clichés. She didn’t really know what she was saying. “Pride” was code for her need to be seen and understood, and the hackneyed expression “I found myself” had helped her leave behind her addicted self and embrace her sober self. Despite my concern for Inga, I felt compassion for the former actress with the strong perfume. Inga became more, rather than less articulate with anger, and I had heard her bark perfectly formed paragraphs of vituperation in defense of a dearly held idea or person. I was relieved to see that she had fallen silent.

“Who bought the letters, Edie?” Henry asked in a deliberate voice, his face apparently imperturbable.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know!” the Burger woman nearly shouted. “Are you crazy?”

“That was the deal, no name. The man paid cash.”

For the first time, Henry looked ruffled. He stared at Edie. “Why, you little idiot,” he said. “Those letters are part of a literary legacy. They belong to posterity, to all of us . . .”

“A stranger has them,” Inga said in an awed voice. “Edie, is there anything in those letters that I should know about?”

An image of Max in a light-filled hotel room came to me then, a mental picture I had seen when Inga told me the story of that day in Paris after they went to the movies. I saw his fingers moving: I can’t tell you.

Edie’s face looked strained. “I’m going to smoke,” she announced, and with an unsteady hand removed a pack of cigarettes from her purse, shook out a cigarette, and lit up. “He sent those letters to me, to me,” she repeated, her voice rising.

“I know,” Inga said quietly. “I know, and if you’d wanted to, you could have burned them or cut them up or blackened out what you never wanted a soul to read—all that was in your power. Don’t you see, Edie, we have to try to come to an understanding, because my daughter and your son are sister and brother. You’ve sold the letters to an anonymous person who could do many things with them, and I think it would be fair to tell me, to tell us, if there’s something in them that might hurt Joel or Sonia someday.”