I was stunned. “How do you know?”

She went to the night table and picked up the sheet of music and looked at it.

“This is not Amelita Galli-Curci’s signature, Bobo. That other woman, the one who looked like her…”

“Fern Weisel?” I said.

“Yes, Fern Weisel. She signed it.”

I could not believe what Amy said. I took the sheet from her and stared at the signature.

“You didn’t know, did you?” she said quietly. “I thought perhaps you did, but you really didn’t, did you?”

I shook my head.

“He admitted it a few years ago only after he knew that he had to,” she explained. “I saw Amelita Galli-Curci’s signature once, when my mother and I were in Margaretville. An antique dealer had it in one of his displays. It was her autograph on a program about the opening of the Galli-Curci Theater. It didn’t look at all like this. And then I visited Avrum—the next day, I think—and I told him about seeing her autograph. I thought it confused him. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and then he asked me to give him his box. He took her picture out of it and sat, holding it, and then he told me the truth. The story about the boa, about her autograph, about the jewelry—it was only something he wished he had done, Bobo. He had to have such a story to make him feel romantic and brave, so he invented it. He wanted to be a hero, and in that story, he was. Even the theft of the pelt was heroic to him. He told us about it because he wanted us to believe in him, and then he told me the truth because he wanted me to think about you.”

She laughed softly, sadly. She looked at the stone, rubbed it between her fingers. “And it worked. I did think about you.” She turned her eyes to me. “When I left that summer, I knew I would have to put you out of my life. It took years for me to manage that, Bobo, but I did. Sometimes, you would pop up, totally unexpected, but I could manage it by making myself busy, by telling myself you were just a memory. And then Avrum told me the truth about the boa and the signature and the jewelry, and you came flooding back, and I couldn’t control it. And then he died and you were here.”

I sat heavily on the bed, near the night table with the candlesticks and the photograph. I could sense something leaving me, something falling away.

Amy sat beside me. “Does it matter what Avrum did?” she said. “I don’t think it does. That’s why I haven’t said anything about it. It wasn’t really a lie; it was an illusion. And that’s all right, I think. Don’t we all do that?”