“Kitty also loved your brother. Truly and deeply. When they were broken up, her play suffered. Her heart wasn’t in it. I pushed her into partying more. I keep telling her that Brad wasn’t for her, that she should play the field.”

Myron thought back to the happy photographs of Kitty, Brad, and Mickey on her Facebook and wondered what could have been. He tried to let his mind settle on those blissful images, but the mind goes where it wants. Right now the mind was veering back to the video of Kitty and Ponytail in that private room at Three Downing. “Kitty made her own mistakes,” he said, hearing the bitterness in his tone. “What you said or didn’t say made no difference. She lied to Brad about everything. She lied about her drug use. She lied to him about my role in their little drama. She even lied about being on the pill.”

But as he said that last part, something in his own words didn’t mesh. Here Kitty was, on the verge of being the next Martina, Chrissie, Steffi, Serena, Venus—and she ends up getting pregnant. Maybe it was, as she claimed, an accident. Anyone who took middle school health class knows that the pill doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. But Myron had never given that excuse an iota of plausibility.

“Does Lex know all this?” he asked.

“All?” She smiled. “No.”

“He told me that was the big issue. People have secrets and those secrets fester and then destroy trust. You can’t have a good relationship without total transparency. You need to know all your spouse’s secrets.”

“Lex said that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s sweet,” she said. “But he’s wrong again.”

“How’s that?”

“No relationship survives total transparency.” Suzze lifted her face off his chest. Myron saw the tears on her cheeks, felt the wetness on his shirt. “We all keep secrets, Myron. You know that as well as anyone.”

By the time Myron made it back to the Dakota, it was three in the morning. He checked to see whether Kitty had replied to his “Please forgive me” message. She hadn’t. On the off chance that Lex had told him the truth—and that Kitty had told Lex the truth—he sent Esperanza an e-mail to see if they could check passenger manifests for Kitty’s name on flights out of Newark or JFK heading to South America. He signed on to the computer to see if Terese was around. She wasn’t.