“Because I needed to know if you ever would,” she said. “I told myself if you confessed on your own, maybe. Maybe I’d think about it different.”

“And?”

“You only told me because she called you,” Diane said. “Because of the boy. You didn’t confess for thirty years. You confessed because you got caught coming.”

She wasn’t wrong. That’s the worst part. Lisa called me about the kid and I panicked and I dressed up my panic as honesty and called it a gift to my wife.

Diane stood up. She put a few bills on the table, her own money, for her own steak.

“The papers are in there,” she said, nodding at the folder. “My lawyer’s number is on top. Call her, don’t call her. It’s already done either way.”

“Diane,” I said. I reached for her hand. She let me hold it for about two seconds. Then she took it back. Easy. No drama.

“Thirty years,” I said. Like the number meant something. Like it could buy me anything.

“I gave you twenty-one good ones,” she said. “I gave the last nine to myself. I think that’s fair.”

She picked up her purse.

“Take care of yourself, Gary.”

And then she walked out into that parking lot she always liked to watch. I sat in the booth with the folder open and her napkin folded into that neat little square next to her plate.

I’m still in that booth, in my head. I haven’t called the lawyer. I keep picking up the phone and putting it down.

I keep thinking about the gap in that kid’s teeth. And how my own wife sat across from me for nine years, smiling at waiters, and built her whole way out so quiet I never heard a sound.

I thought I was the one with the secret.