“I’d say you know quite a lot. More than most people,” she added.

Alec’s hands tightened on the railing, but he didn’t respond.

Lottie cleared her throat. “The edition Uncle Alfred released of the collected poems sold out its entire first printing. The second went even faster.”

Alec vaguely remembered that his payments had increased for a time, but his focus had been on how the money would be spent.

“And I helped put it together.”

At that he faced her. “I didn’t realize you were such an acolyte.”

A faint blush stained her cheekbones. “I wasn’t. It was merely something to do at first. Something more interesting than making calls, anyway. But the way your father wrote about Italy with such passion, such love, as if he were writing about a person…” She paused and shook her head. “I had always wanted to visit the village, you know, because of my parents. But after I read his poems, I wanted to come here for the rest of the country as well.”

Spurred by her words, a memory suddenly surfaced: Alec traipsing over a bridge on a warm spring afternoon, his father’s large hand clutching his own. They were swinging their arms back and forth while Alec repeated lines of poetry back to him. It won’t stand up on the page if it cannot stand up to life, his father had explained. The conviction in his voice still rang out across the decades. They had spent so many days just like that: wandering around the city while his father worked out rhythms.

“And has Italy lived up to your expectations?” His voice had gone a bit thick.

Lottie gave him a soft, sad smile. “In a way.” Then she sighed. “But I hadn’t realized that he wasn’t writing about a country so much as the nature of love.”

Alec’s fingers gripped the railing even tighter. “Yes. My mother was quite a woman.”

She was immortalized in his father’s poems as a dazzlingly beautiful but humble laundress whose hazel eyes and silky, gold-spun curls had arrested him from across a canal. The pair had fallen deeply in love before they even spoke, and she was rescued from a life of hard labor.

A devastatingly romantic story. Not a word was true.

Lottie gave Alec a puzzled frown. “That was part of it, certainly,” she began slowly, as if she was choosing her words with the utmost care. “But I wasn’t speaking only of romance. He loved the both of you; the life you all had together. I found that most affecting.” She paused to take a breath. Or to gather her courage. Alec braced himself for what was coming. “And it helped me to understand later why he…he—”

“—drank himself to death.”