The thought of marriage never entered her mind, she said. She was not in love with him, she had never been in love with him—besides nostalgia for high school they had no interests in common—and she had no desire to have this man in her life for years to come. When she told him she was pregnant, she also made it clear that she expected nothing from him. She had wealthy parents, who, as it happened, were more delighted than upset to learn of their daughter’s condition. They had always regretted not having been able to have more than one child themselves. Whatever the circumstances, the promise of a grandchild was cause for celebration.

And since my friend’s boyfriend had returned from the war feeling lost and unsure of just about everything except that he was not ready for fatherhood, he was all for a plan that subtracted him from the story. In any case, he longed to leave his hometown and start a new life elsewhere. He didn’t even wait for the baby to be born before taking off.

A decade of silence ended with news of his death. One day, he and his wife happened to be out driving in the country when they came upon a house whose second floor was in flames and from which, the wife later explained, her husband said he’d heard screaming. He had run into the house and up the stairs and then, overcome by the heat and smoke, suffered cardiac arrest. Firefighters arriving just minutes later were unable to revive him. As for the screams, the wife herself had heard nothing, she said, and it turned out that, at the time of the fire, no one was home.

I should never have told her that story, my friend said. I should’ve pretended all along that I had no idea who her father was.

In the mother’s eyes, the father, insignificant enough to begin with, had diminished with time to practically nothing. For the daughter, absence had only made him loom ever larger, and in death he became a colossus.

Strikingly handsome—see the high school yearbook. (You’d have expected him to be with someone a lot prettier was one of the sharper arrows in the daughter’s quiver.) A soldier: brave, romantic. A hero who’d sacrificed his life to save strangers from a burning house. A man like that doesn’t simply abandon his own child. And yet she had never met him. She had never even spoken with him.

And whose fault was that?

It broke her heart, said my friend, when she was cleaning out her daughter’s closet one day and found the letters she’d been secretly writing him.

And in which, it seemed, she had poured out all her resentment against mother and grandparents.