She had tried once in the fall to talk to Annie about all of this, to suggest to her that perhaps Rosemary was simply a sad friend of Graham’s. She said she wasn’t sure that Graham had, in fact, been unfaithful to Annie with Rosemary—Annie’s evidence for it seemed so tenuous, really. So much a matter of her interpretation of Rosemary’s grieving. It was just as likely, wasn’t it, that Rosemary’s grief was for the loss in her own life that Graham’s death had reminded her of? Hadn’t she just been divorced? Hadn’t Annie said that? Frieda knew that emptiness, that sorrowful void—in some ways worse than a death. A failure. A defeat. A deep, deep defeat. It had been so harrowing a loss for her that she could imagine Rosemary’s being reminded of it by Graham’s death.

She said this to Annie on one of the occasions Annie had come over—she had taken to appearing at Frieda’s apartment once or twice a week through these months. Frieda was the only person she could talk to about this, she said. It was too painful, too humiliating, to discuss it with anyone else. She didn’t want to ruin anyone else’s memories of Graham, either.

When Frieda began to make her suggestion that perhaps Rosemary was just another mourner, not necessarily a lover, Annie had sat upright and stared across Frieda’s kitchen table at her. Frieda faltered and stopped talking. Annie waited a moment and then said, “Did you, or did you not, sit there and tell me that you knew they were lovers?” Her dark eyes seemed to snap.

How could Frieda have said then that she was talking about another lover? A lover from earlier in Annie and Graham’s marriage? How could she have added that to the complication of rage and sorrow Annie was feeling?

“I did tell you that,” she had said then to Annie. “You’re right, I did. I’m sorry, I just . . . suppose in some way I just can’t believe it myself.”

“You can’t believe it!” Annie said, bitterly. “Imagine how I feel.”

“I know. I know, Annie.”

“And I have to behave as if I don’t feel that way. I have to act my part—my part being the grieving widow. And I hate that, Frieda.” She smacked the table, hard, and Frieda started back. “I hate it. That I have to pretend.” Her voice was almost breaking.

“I know,” Frieda had said. “I understand.”

It was then that Annie had said that Frieda was the only person she could talk to.

What about Edith? Frieda had asked. Couldn’t Annie talk to her? But even as she began to say the words, she understood how selfish she was being.

In any case, Annie had said no. She didn’t want to tell anyone else. She shook her head fiercely, her teeth bared. There was nothing pretty about her. “That’s how it becomes gossip, that’s how it happens,” she had said. “You tell one person you trust, and after a while they’re not able to keep it to themselves. They tell one person they trust, and maybe that person doesn’t care as much about you, about the principals in the event, as it were. And it’s such a delicious story, they can’t help but pass it on. And pretty soon you’ve got a universe of people in on the secret.” She laughed, humorlessly. “Yes, in on it, but anxious that you shouldn’t know that, you shouldn’t know that they’re in on it. And so they start acting too, and before you know it, you can’t tell a fucking thing about anyone anymore. About whether they might know, or whether they don’t have the foggiest.”

Frieda sat, silent, at a loss. She felt the accusation in everything Annie was saying.

Annie leaned forward, almost smiling. “And then someone, somehow, eventually tells someone who knows Sarah, or who knows Lucas, and wants to talk to them about it, or maybe just accidentally mentions it—” She sat back. “And then they’re mired in it too. And their sense of knowing their father—it’s done.”

Frieda needed to say something.

“I don’t think that’s right,” she offered. “I don’t think anyone would ever mention anything about it to Sarah or Lucas.”

“No? Didn’t you, in fact, mention it to me?”

“You asked, Annie. I assumed you knew already.”

There was a silence. Then Annie said, “But what if I hadn’t known, Frieda? If I hadn’t known for sure. What if I expected you to say, ‘No, that never happened. No. You mustn’t believe that about Graham for even one second.’”

Frieda had felt trapped, really. Closed in with Annie’s grief and rage.

And she was angry too, she realized. When what she most wanted was to mourn Graham for herself, to remember what had been sweetest in their falling in love, in their early marriage. To remember his generosity to her over the long years, his unfailing loyalty. Every year on her birthday, he came over with champagne and gifts. When her father died, he stayed with her three or four evenings in a row, until she felt she might be able to sleep.

Sometimes he just stopped by, for a game of Scrabble or a beer, and they talked—about Lucas, about Sarah. About books or movies. Stupid things—the price of real estate. A good joke he’d heard.

Why couldn’t she have had her own tender sorrow about all that? Why did she have to be plunged into what Annie was feeling? Why did she have to listen to Annie going over and over her betrayal? Sometimes she wanted to ask her that, or to tell her to stop, to tell her not to come over again. Once she sat upstairs, unmoving and silent, while Annie rang the bell again and again down in the foyer. The shrill of the bell itself seemed full of rage to her, but finally Annie left. And then Frieda felt guilty about that.

It had ended, though. Perhaps Frieda wasn’t able to offer Annie enough of what she needed. Perhaps Annie had a sense of Frieda’s resistance to her view of things. Perhaps Annie had begun to talk to Edith, or to someone else, and was taking comfort there. For whatever reason, as the fall wore on, as the days grew darker, Annie stopped coming over to Frieda’s so much, and then wasn’t coming at all.

What Frieda felt at first was mostly relief. But then she began to worry about Annie. Her dear friend, after all.

So Frieda called her, finally, in early December, to ask how she was, how she was managing. “Very nicely, thank you,” Annie said. Then she’d laughed, unconvincingly. Not even intending to be convincing, it seemed to Frieda.

But Frieda kept trying, kept calling. She reminded herself of the way Annie had responded to the toast at the bookstore party. Of the way she had been feeling about Annie and herself as she planned the toast. She kept calling, and slowly, gingerly, over the holidays and the long dark months of deepest winter, there seemed to be a kind of rapprochement between them. Or so Frieda thought. So she hoped.

Not exactly what she had wished for. That would take time. But she had plenty of that.

In late February, Jeanne gave birth to a girl, Claire, named after an unmarried aunt of hers, the aunt who had favored Jeanne among all her nephews and nieces. Who had paid for the classes at the drama school Jeanne had attended in Paris before she moved to America.

At Lucas and Jeanne’s invitation, Frieda went down to New York to help out the day after Jeanne came home with the baby. She felt this invitation as a gift, a reassuring affirmation of her place in the family, of her unique role as Claire’s grandmother. Her happiness about this touched everything she did with meaning in those days at the apartment.

She stayed for a week, sleeping on the couch in the living room and getting up in the night when Claire began to cry. Or not to cry exactly, but to make a noise that sounded to Frieda like the creaky hinge on a door that was swinging open and shut slowly, over and over.

She would go to Claire’s crib, just off the dining room. She’d pick her up and hold her until she calmed, singing softly to her, songs she’d sung to Lucas long ago. She’d set her down and speak to her while she changed her wet, sometimes shitty Pampers. She’d clean her bottom, change her sleeper if it too was soaked through. Then she’d pick her up again and take her down the long narrow hallway to Jeanne and Lucas’s bedroom.

When Frieda opened their door, she was aware of the closed-in, humid air. It smelled of birth and milk and old blood and the heat of their bodies, Jeanne’s and Lucas’s. It felt almost shockingly intimate to Frieda the first time she came in. She bent forward to touch Jeanne’s shoulder, holding the weightless curl of Claire’s body against her own. The tiny girl was already turning her head back and forth across Frieda’s front, in quest of the nipple.

When she went back alone to the living room to lie down again on the couch night after night, Frieda was flooded with memories of how it had been when Lucas was a baby—that same sense of being closed up inside a life that had been magically and completely altered.

She had never been as happy as she was then—Graham had seemed so enchanted with Lucas, with her. She had thought this was the miracle that would bring him back to her, the miracle that would make their world—the three of them, the three of them in bed—enough for him. She couldn’t imagine that he didn’t feel, as she did, the joyful sense of having made something whole again that had been broken, having completed something. For a while, it had seemed to her that it might be possible, that miracle.

She didn’t know when it started again, the other women. She didn’t know, actually, if it had ever stopped. She wouldn’t have known, she’d been so inward-turned, she’d felt so safe, so happy.