We reached his house and climbed the steep steps to his front door. There was a commotion going on inside. Alicia and her partner, Erin, were in the first of the adjoining reception rooms with Hanan, all of them laughing loudly. Alicia had a shiny black device strapped on over her eyes attached by cable to a monitor with a stereoscopic image of what looked like the inside of a fairground House of Horror. She was leaping with shock, staggering back as if the floor had just collapsed beneath her, flailing her arms as if to fend someone off (a man with six-inch fingernails and a face like Freddy Krueger had appeared on the monitor), all the while shrieking with terror and dissolving into giggles. Erin stood behind her, catching her as she fell and keeping her from banging the wall as she jerked sideways from her imaginary attackers. Hanan explained what was going on: the mask was a virtual-reality headset. We stood with her for a bit, laughing along, and then Marco noticed a light flashing on the answering machine by the sofa in the next room. He went in through the open archway.

“Could you guys be quiet a moment?” he called out. “Please?”

Alicia took off the headset, and we quietened down. The voice that came spilling out as he hit the playback button silenced us completely. It was high-pitched, unsteady, and filled with a bitter rage so intense it was as if some tormented spirit from the underworld were manifesting itself in the cozy shabbiness of the living room.

“Yes, this is a message for Marco Rosedale. Marco, I want you to know you haven’t succeeded in silencing me. It’s Julia here by the way, Julia Gault. I’ve found a publisher for my memoir. I’m sure your papa knows her, if you don’t. Renata Shenker. She’s going to publish the whole thing. As a book. Whitethorne Press. The White-thorne Press. Anyway I’m making some revisions. I’m going to say you raped me, Marco. Yes. This time I’m going to say it. Because you did. You raped me.”

Marco hung motionless for a moment, bent over the end table as if trying to convince himself the message was just the result of some freakish malfunction of the answering machine. Straightening up, he turned back to the archway and looked at the four of us with a stunned, almost dreamy expression. His daughter had flushed pink. Erin was staring off to the side with an odd smile. Hanan faced him, her eyes glittering as if a mass of thoughts were already firing in rapid succession behind them.

“Who was that?” she asked.