“Dolores, I swear, it feels like my heart could break.” She dug into her shallow clutch for a handkerchief and lowered her head to discreetly wipe her eyes. “At first it seems so reasonable—I’ve always wanted children, after all. But then I end up feeling like I’m just a little crazy.” A fresh surge of anguish overwhelmed her for a moment. “Oh, I apologize. How can it ache so horribly when I don’t even know what I’m missing? I’ve no excuse for this.”

If I said something—the agreeable things I could say without betraying the Professor and destroying Camille, and probably her marriage, too—it would only make her more uncomfortable. She would abuse herself, say she should know better than to be such a dramatic old bird, and then apologize me into silence. So instead I kept quiet, mimicking the aloof behavior of other Mems and hoping she might assume the situation was simply too complex for me to understand. Despite our long history, she always let me. And because I knew more of hers than she remembered, it didn’t bother me. I was part of the charade now, no longer an innocent caught between two worlds. Like the Professor and Dolores’s parents and countless others, I’d become defender of the illusion. Curator of a false history.

While Camille put away her handkerchief and flicked the last tears from her cheeks, I gave her something like a smile and she offered a nervous titter in return. “Anyway. Forget I said anything. I wish the lights would go down, at least.”

For the rest of the night and while we headed back into the winter evening, Virginia Valli’s hairdo was all Camille could talk about.

Almost a year later, in October 1925, I discovered that emotional residue was not an experience limited to Sources. Lyman Shepherd was a case study in how those who loved Sources could suffer a variation of the phenomenon all their own.

After putting his wife to bed and collecting some of the broken glass into a dustpan, he’d joined me in his kitchen with his “auto kit,” a tin box stocked with emergency first aid materials. Dolores’s attendant was fine, he told me, only too proud to face anyone. Lyman’s implication was that she’d embarrassed herself with her violent outburst, but I doubted that she cared much about that—it’d been Dolores’s response that humiliated her. The fact that anyone would defend a Mem. In any event, Lyman wasn’t upset with me. Pensive, yes. Or maybe he was simply waiting to see what my response would be.