"I haven't decided if forgiveness is a door or a hallway," Helen said. "Right now I'm still looking for the building."
Diane also interviewed — carefully, without tipping her hand — two of Robert's former colleagues from the firm. One remembered Margaret vaguely as "a friend Bob mentioned once at a Christmas party, maybe a cousin?" The other remembered nothing. The hospice agency confirmed again that no Margaret Ellison had ever been on their roster; Robert had called them to say he had arranged private nursing and would not need their staff after all. Helen had signed the paperwork without reading the fine print because she was tired and because she trusted him, and trust, she was learning, is a form of reading you do with your eyes closed.
In late November, Diane drove to the public library in Margaret's town and searched old newspapers on microfilm for no reason she could defend. She found Margaret's name once, in a 1994 volunteer listing for a hospital auxiliary. She found Robert's name in a dozen places — Rotary, church fundraisers, a letter to the editor about school budgets. Separate columns. Parallel lives. The microfilm machine hummed like an insect. Diane left with a headache and a clarity that felt like nausea: her father had not been living a double life so much as annotating a single one in invisible ink.
Margaret Ellison lived in a small brick duplex on a quiet street lined with maples that had begun, that October, to drop their first cautious leaves. Helen parked across from the brown dog's favorite hydrant and sat with both hands on the wheel for a full minute, practicing the sentence she had decided to open with and discarding it for silence. She wore the black cardigan. She carried nothing but her purse and the oldest letter, folded small enough to fit in her palm like a secret that had already stopped being secret.
Margaret answered on the second knock. She was sixty-eight, white American, short gray hair, a face that had been pretty in the way of women who never quite believed the adjective applied to them and had therefore aged into something more interesting than pretty. She wore jeans and a soft green sweater. Behind her, the brown dog — older close up, muzzle frosted — wagged once and then retreated, as if it understood that some visitors were not for greeting.
Margaret's eyes found Helen's face and did not pretend confusion.
"Helen," she said. Not Mrs. Marsh. Helen. The name of a woman spoken by someone who had practiced not speaking it aloud for a very long time.
"May I come in?"