“I was angry too. I should have sent the scripts back with a curt note. I never should have taken on the picture, but Denise thought Maisie was the perfect role, and she really wanted it. I wanted Denise to be happy.”

“Do you still want her to be happy?”

“It’s a marriage,” he replied. “Marriage always requires compromises.”

I didn’t want to have to feel sorry for him, but I did. He had squandered love and time; he had broken up his marriage to Julia because he loved Denise, and now, it seemed, he had only dreary compromises to show for it. Well, they were not all he had. To watch him with this tiny baby was to see a man in love.

He walked around the room, patting the baby’s back, and his gaze fell on the huge framed poster from the 1931 Cyrano de Bergerac starring Rowland Granville over the fireplace. He seemed to study it. “I used to think Rowland and Florence broke up just because they were young—she was only nineteen when they got married—or he didn’t like living in California, or any other number of reasons. But now I think it was because Florence didn’t know how to love Rowland, or how to love you, for that matter. She didn’t know how to love anyone, because Julia and I forgot how to love her. I’ve been thinking about this for months now, even before this little boy was born.” He kissed the baby’s cheek and played with his nose. “It’s a cycle that repeats itself, and what a terrible thing it was for Florence to grow up without a mother and father who loved her.”

“It is a terrible thing.”

“You speak from experience.”

“I didn’t have a mother and father, but I never felt unloved. I had you and Julia.”

Leon smoothed the baby’s wispy hair, and it seemed to me that he pondered before he spoke next. “What will happen to Aaron if his mother and father don’t love him?”

“You love him.”

“I won’t live forever.”

I peered at him more closely. While he still looked like Leon Greene, and carried himself like Leon Greene, he did not sound like the titan of Empire we all loved and feared. For the first time I saw that he was an old man.

The baby squirmed and started to squall. Leon put him on his shoulder, jiggled him, and made soothing noises. “Mrs. Shea will have a fit if she hears him. She’s an absolute Nazi about his schedule. The whole house has to run on the baby’s schedule. She was locked in a power struggle with Clarence right up until the day he left.”

“Clarence left?” I couldn’t have been more shocked if he had said the planets all fell from their orbits. “Did you fire him?”