Caitlin makes a wry face, then sips her martini and looks out her window. “Was she good in bed?”

“A gentleman never tells.”

She turns and punches my shoulder. “Jerk.”

“What would you guess?”

“Probably. She has the intensity for it.”

Yes. . .

“How did her father split you up?”

“He took a malpractice case against my father and pressed it to the wall. My dad was exonerated, but the trial was so brutal it nearly broke him. There was no way Livy and I could work through that.”

Caitlin is watching me intently. “You’re leaving a lot out, aren’t you?”

Of course I am. How do we explain the abiding mysteries of our lives? “Livy never showed up at Ole Miss,” I say softly. “She disappeared. Fell off the face of the planet. Her parents told people she’d gone to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, but I called to check, and they had no record of her. A year later word filtered out that she’d just entered the University of Virginia as a freshman. I have no idea where she spent the previous year, and neither does anyone else.”

“Maybe she got pregnant. Went off and had the baby somewhere.”

“I thought about that. But this was the late seventies, not the fifties. Her older sister had gotten pregnant a few years before, and she had an abortion, even though they were Catholic. Livy would have done the same thing. She wouldn’t have let anything slow down her career.” There’s another reason I’m sure pregnancy is not the answer, but there’s no point in getting clinical about it.

“Why did she go to the University of Virginia?”

“I think because it was far from Mississippi but still the South. She got an unlisted number, cut herself off from her old friends. By the time my father’s trial got going, I didn’t care anymore.”

“You didn’t ask her why her father was going after yours?”

This memory is one of my worst. “I flew up to Charlottesville a week before the trial, to try to get her to make Leo drop the case. My dad had already had a heart attack from the stress. She said she thought it was just a normal case, and that her father wouldn’t listen to her opinion anyway. She was back in her high school queen mode, winning hearts and minds at UVA. It was like talking to a stranger.” I take a burning sip of Scotch. “I wanted to kill her.”

“Yes, but you loved her. You’re still in love with her.”

“No.”

Caitlin smiles, not without empathy. “You are. You always will be.”

“That’s a depressing thought.”