The night was so cold I brought a heavy wool blanket out to the backyard where Carlo was on one of the chaise lounges studying winter constellations. I lay down on top of him so we were both staring at the sky together, and pulled up the blanket. I was feeling a recent neediness that made my body want to touch his more often. He didn’t object.

There was a little while of silence, just the two of us except for the pugs, their small shadows moving about the yard like beige moons, before I said, “Tell me a story.” I was being cagey, with something specific in mind that I couldn’t let go of after Gemma-Kate’s interview. That question about Jane he hadn’t answered.

“Well.” He thought. “Okay, I’ve never told you this one. I was teaching this course on the history of witchcraft and this one kid—” The sentence was interrupted by his laughter, laughing so hard I could feel his gut jumping beneath my back.

I interrupted him. I heard myself interrupting him with a coyly innocent voice while the self-possessed, secure Quinn inside of me yelled leave it alone, you idiot. “Not that. Tell me something about your first marriage. About Jane.”

His gut stopped jumping. “Why?”

“You’ve never talked much about Jane.”

“You never asked me.”

That was evasive. Was his breathing harder beneath my back than it had been a moment before? Could it be that my sweet honest hubs had a secret as big as any of my own? Lying on top of him could be the next best thing to a polygraph. I tried to keep my own breathing in check as I said, “Come on, tell me something good.”

“What would you like to know?” he said, sounding a little cagey himself.

Is this how we always had been, or was it new?

“She sounds like such a good person.”

I must have managed to keep the sarcasm out of my voice, because he said, “Oh, she was that.”

“So tell me … tell me how you met,” I said, and then focused on keeping my breathing light and regular.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Why not? Are you okay with talking about her?”

“Of course.”

I think we both lied, but he began anyway.

In those days, Carlo said, the earliest of the feminist movement, and way before denominations other than the Roman Catholics routinely ordained women as ministers, there was no such thing as a female chaplain. When Carlo DiForenza, during his pastoral training, went to work at Lansing, the office was in the women’s prison.

There he met Jane, who was a volunteer doing literacy training.

“She and I worked together over the course of the three months I was at the prison. We shared an office, compared notes on different inmates, which ones had potential for change and which were the unredeemable bad apples. She was grateful for my advice.”