Squares and Wanda

Squares and Wanda’s relationship enters the narrative indirectly, through Will Klein’s observation that something has happened between them and his decision not to press Squares for an explanation. The exchange makes their connection significant as a private matter Squares is reluctant to share, while leaving its nature and consequences deliberately undisclosed.

What Will Knows

At breakfast, Squares eats a bagel with lox, chewing slowly with his shoulders drooped. Will knows Squares did not stay home the previous night and understands that something happened between him and Wanda. He also recognizes that Squares does not want to be asked about it. The account supplies no further explanation: it does not define their relationship, identify what occurred, or say whether the episode was resolved.

That limit matters. The relationship is not described through a shared scene between Squares and Wanda; it is registered through the effect of their private encounter on Squares and Will’s reading of his mood. Will’s certainty that something happened is distinct from knowledge of what it means. The narrative establishes the first while withholding the second.

A Conversation Left Unopened

Will does not ask Squares about Wanda. Instead, Squares prompts him to return to the subject of what might be worse, and Will says that Sheila Rogers lied to him. The conversation turns toward a different, increasingly consequential discovery: Sheila knew Julie Miller, and the two had been college sorority sisters and roommates. Squares stops chewing when he hears this, then listens as Will explains what he has learned.

The shift shows how the unspoken issue between Squares and Wanda sits alongside the investigation without taking it over. Squares’s silence about his own circumstances is followed by his participation in Will’s account of Sheila and Julie. The scene does not say that he has forgotten or resolved the matter with Wanda; it simply shows that he does not make it the subject of their exchange.

Squares as Listener and Investigator

After hearing Will out, Squares leans back, crosses his arms, and calls the revelation striking. He then helps test possible explanations for Sheila’s connection to Julie. They consider whether the overlap could be coincidence, including whether Sheila might not have remembered Will’s earlier relationship with Julie, before turning to the possibility that Sheila knew who Will was from the beginning. Their discussion ends without an answer to that question.

This investigative conversation provides the clearest context for the brief Wanda reference. Will is attentive to Squares’s reluctance, but the two continue talking through difficult material: Sheila’s possible deception, Julie’s murder eleven years earlier, and the FBI’s interest in questioning Sheila about an unsolved double murder in Albuquerque. Will says that his thoughts keep returning to New Mexico. The narrative thus places their unspoken personal knowledge beside the work they can discuss openly, without claiming that one explains or causes the other.

What Remains Unresolved

The evidence supports a guarded connection between Squares and Wanda and a moment when something between them weighs on Squares. It does not establish the precise nature of their bond, the cause of the previous night’s events, Wanda’s perspective, or any later change in the relationship. Will’s choice not to ask is the scene’s defining boundary: the reader is allowed to recognize Squares’s private difficulty, but not to turn that recognition into an explanation the text does not provide.