"There was never any Linda. I made her up in March. I made up the job and the cat and the sister in New Britain. I made up the bad back. I met Delia on Wednesday. Well. I met her on Wednesday for the second time. It's complicated."
"I know," said his mother again, very gently.
"How?" He looked up at her. "How long have you known?"
Barbara Callahan folded her hands on the tablecloth. In the snowlight she looked older than she had last night by candlelight, and also, somehow, younger: there was something in her face he had not seen there since before his father died, a kind of mischief, a kind of nerve.
"About Linda?" she said. "Since April. Your letters about her were the worst writing you have ever done, Wesley. You described a dental hygienist the way you'd describe a used car. You never once told me anything she said. You never told me a single thing that made you laugh. A mother knows the difference between a son who's in love and a son who's filling out a form." She smiled. "And then in June you gave her a cat, and you've never in your life been able to stay in the same room as a cat, and I thought, well, there it is, he's built himself a wall to hide behind and he's furnished it."
"Then why didn't you say anything?"
"Because I thought that if my son needed so badly for me to believe he was all right," said his mother, "then maybe the kindest thing was to let him think I did." She reached over and straightened the edge of the napkin under the ring. "And because I knew if I wrote that letter, the one about Thanksgiving, you'd have to do *something*. I didn't know what. I thought you'd come alone and confess, and we'd have a good cry over the turkey and that would be that. I didn't expect you to bring anybody." She paused. "I certainly didn't expect you to bring her."
Wes went still. "What do you mean, *her*?"
His mother looked at him for a long moment. Then she pushed back her chair and went upstairs again, and this time she was gone longer. He heard the closet in her bedroom, and the scrape of something being lifted down from a high shelf. When she came back she was carrying the old floral stationery box she had kept her letters in for as long as he could remember, and she set it on the table and lifted the lid and took out, from the very bottom, beneath a bundle of his own postcards held together with a rubber band, an envelope.