She had not decided to. She had lain awake the first night and part of the second deciding not to, and then she was sitting across from him and he was telling her, in his slow way, about the dog Lem had left behind in Kansas, a black-and-tan hound named Sergeant who still went down to the road every evening at six to wait for the boy, and she heard herself say, "I knew it wasn't him."
He stopped talking.
She told him. All of it. The icehouse, the muslin, the five whole fingers, the callus across the palm. She told him how she had wrapped the hand again and gone out and said nothing, and how she had stood at the grave in April and said nothing, and how she had gone on saying nothing for two years. She did not tell him why. She tried to, and found that she could not get it into words that did not sound like an excuse or a boast, and so she only said, "I didn't want to know where he was," and let that stand.
Tallis was quiet for a long time. He looked at the table. He turned his cup a quarter turn, and then another.
"Two years," he said at last.
"Yes."
"My mother sat up two years."
"I know it."
"If you'd said, that January —" He stopped. She watched him work it through, the way she had watched him work the hinge on the shed door, slowly and with care, trying it this way and that. "If you'd said, they'd have known it was some other man. They wouldn't have known which. They'd have put it in the Herald, maybe. A stranger, found on the Halfmoon. I don't know that I'd have seen it. I was in Kansas till September."