“She knows you love her. She’s always known. I am sure of it.”

“I don’t see how. I left them. I left them both. Just before Kat’s fourth birthday. I . . . I just . . . I wanted to disappear. I went to the beach at the Venice Midway and I was going to step into the ocean and just keep walking until it took me . . .”

Her voice falls away. I can almost believe she let the sea have its way except that here she is next to me.

“And then?” I gently ask.

She blinks, long and slow, as if she’s being pulled back from the frothing surf. “There were some people on the beach who had opium, and they invited me to . . . to be with them. Share their pipe. Share everything. So I did. And I let whoever wanted to touch me touch me, and I lay with whoever wanted to lie with me. It seemed an easier way to dissolve than walking into the ocean and drowning. And it was working. I was disappearing, a little more each day. It almost worked.”

“But something happened?” I ask, because something surely did.

She is slow to answer.

“My father had heard from one of his club friends that I had been seen down there, in the company of scum, as he said,” she finally replies. “He found me and brought me home. Home to Martin, that is. Martin hadn’t even been looking for me.”

Candace sighs heavily. I can see how exhausting this is for her. “I picked it up there in the alleys near the Venice Midway, this disease that is killing me.” She laughs lightly, and it is a laugh empty of all mirth. “So, you see, I am disappearing after all. I am getting what I thought I wanted.”

Again I squeeze her hand. It is all I can do. I cannot undo what has been done. I cannot give her back her husband or her dead children or her health or the wasted years with Kat.

“It was all—too much—for my mother,” Candace says, a sob cracking her words into pieces. “She couldn’t bear to see me the way I was. She died less than six months later. I’d broken her heart.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.”

“No. I did.”

Candace is quiet for several moments. She closes her eyes against the anguish of having lost her mother and feeling responsible for that loss. “It makes perfect sense now,” she says many seconds later, eyes still closed and her voice void of strength.

“What does?”

She opens her eyes and looks across the patio to Kat’s sleeping form. “Martin had wanted me to take my own life. It was good enough for him that I came down with consumption instead. That’s why he was against my coming here. He wanted me dead because he had Kat. And Kat would inherit the trust.”

I know she is right about that, but it doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t explain why Martin left Los Angeles. Why he placed that advertisement. “Why, then, do you suppose he fled with her to San Francisco?”