“No.” I turned more in his direction, putting one of my feet on the crossbar of his chair but not touching him. I kept my face still so he couldn’t see the hurt that his excuse had caused, that he would keep a secret from his living wife in order to stay loyal to his dead one. She was dead, for Pete’s sake. Why would she care more than me? There was something fucked up about that. “You could have kept it to yourself before you started. Now you have to tell the story.”

He looked alarmed at that, like a suspect who knows he’s been found out. Then he started in an unexpected direction, not one with hearts and flowers and a slightly prim love story like I would expect about him and Jane.

Carlo said he knew that when it came to working with inmates there was a delicate balance between being helpful and being a patsy. Carlo understood getting conned. He knew all about it from watching the grief his brother, Franco, had put his parents through. But Jane hadn’t had this counsel.

“Shortly after my work at the prison was finished, she called and asked to see me. She was crying. Oh, how she cried.”

I don’t cry much. “It just rips your heart out when they cry,” I said, but Carlo was too wrapped in his memories of dear innocent Jane to notice the irony.

“So what did they do to sucker her?” I asked.

“I can’t remember all the details. Some routine setup, a prisoner asking her to mail a letter for him, which—”

“Is verboten even though it seems like such a harmless thing,” I finished for him.

“It escalated slowly, with this and that little favor, you know how it goes.”

“I do.”

“Until he said he’d turn her in if she didn’t have sex with him.”

“The poor lamb,” I murmured rather than I cannot believe she fell for that.

Carlo, clueless to my subtext, continued, “Jane asked me what she should do, and I told her I’d go with her to tell everything to the warden, and vouch for her. She did that, and was told she couldn’t volunteer at the prison anymore, but they wouldn’t press any charges.”

“Thank God,” I said.

Carlo told me how they went out to lunch after that, and then lunch again, and then dinner. At first Jane asked him to be her spiritual director, and they started talking about theology, but it always got off track somehow and went to what novels they were both reading, what movies they’d seen. Serious novels, serious movies, I assumed. No, not movies. Films.

“I bet she loved Italian food,” I said, and went on before he could catch the snark in my voice. “So when did you actually become lovers? After you became a priest? Before?”