I am no more inclined for flight tonight than I was then, but what choice do I have? She’s found me out. She knows my weakness, my terrible need. She understands how deeply I require the knowledge inside her head.

I did not lie to you. I never said I wasn’t Sam Mallory’s daughter, did I? Since leaving home, I’ve told only one person, and that was Velázquez. I told him in the last hours I knew him, as we walked around the dusky streets of Paris together. It was my final hope, my single remaining card to play, my ace, and though Velázquez was at first disbelieving, then astonished, and then struck with awe at this evidence of God’s mysterious ways, still he wouldn’t break his promise. He apologized and explained that it was not his secret to tell.

I forgave him for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for misleading you. It’s just that I don’t tell anybody who I am. People have a way of making assumptions about you, when they discover you were spawned by some famous person, some person they think they knew because they read about him in a newspaper. And to reveal your true self to another person, that’s like taking a knife and paring away a section of your own skin, so that somebody else can see the workings of your blood and muscle for himself.

But here is the truth. When I was thirteen years old, as I said before, my mother told me my father had left us for good this time, had taken up with one of his whores and wanted no more to do with us. She packed me in the car and took me to Reno, Nevada, where you could then obtain the most efficient divorce in America. She told me we would move to a new home in Washington State, containing a new father, whose name she adopted for me. She told me that Mr. Everett would take better care of me than Mallory ever had, and I should take him to my heart. I didn’t believe her. I tried to run away and find my father again, but I didn’t get far before my stepfather found me and brought me back and whipped me on my naked buttocks with his belt. He told me that my mother had just been protecting my feelings, that my father was actually dead, he had been killed in an airplane crash like the crazy fool he was, and I should forget he had ever existed.