She kept herself calm in the days before—packing a few things, arranging a comfortable traveling wagon—but Marcella gave her a long look as she closed the trunk. “Cornelia,” she said thoughtfully, “do you have a secret?”

“Of course not.” Though Cornelia sometimes wondered why she had told Lollia about Drusus, and not Marcella. Marcella was her sister, Marcella had a lock instead of a mouth, Marcella knew everything anyway . . . but somehow, she’d spilled her burden to Lollia instead, and felt no impulse to spill it again now. Marcella wasn’t the only one who could keep her sister shut out of her business. “I don’t believe in secrets, and I certainly don’t have any. Do you?”

“Many.” Marcella stretched her pale arms overhead. “That’s how I know the look.”

“Ridiculous.” Cornelia brushed her off, climbing into her wagon for Tarracina, knowing Drusus would be a day behind on a mule drover’s train. Tarracina, beautiful jewel-blue Tarracina, where a white marble villa waited on a cliff top.

“Domina.” The steward bowed when she arrived. “I have prepared the house for you, on Lady Tullia’s instructions. The slaves are prepared to—”

“No slaves, please. I’ll tend to everything myself.”

“Domina?”

“Thank you, you may go.” Cornelia kicked off her sandals as she prowled through the empty villa. A gift from Lollia’s grandfather when Gaius entered the Senate, and as beautiful as any of his houses. Every niche graced with some work of art in marble or silver or ivory, every tile and column and piece of furniture chosen to adorn and not just to serve. How did I ever think Lollia’s grandfather was vulgar? Freedman or no, he had more good taste in one finger than Tullia did in her whole patrician-born body.

“You’re sure this is the right place?” Drusus said when he arrived, looking around the airy porticoed halls. “Surely a disgraced ex-soldier like me isn’t allowed in a house like this. Disgraced filthy ex-soldier,” he added, looking down at his travel stains as Cornelia dragged him inside.

“I’ll only have you thrown out if you don’t carry me to bed.” Cornelia tugged him toward the bedchamber. “Right now.”

“Is it safe?” he asked, shedding his travel-dusty cloak.

“No one here but us.” She tossed back the bed’s airy white curtains, spinning a happy circle. “I left my maid behind, dismissed the slaves, and got rid of the steward. No one but us for ten days.”

Days and days in a wide bed that smelled of lilac, broad windows open to a horizon of blue sea framed by billowing curtains so that they slept nearly afloat in the sky. Days and days of home-cooked breakfasts on the circular terrace—or so Cornelia imagined, until she tried to make bread and it refused to rise.