Livy turns and peers into the cloudy water. “My divorce has upset her quite a bit. Divorce isn’t part of the fairy tale. If it were, she’d have left my father long ago.”

“I thought you were only separated.”

“Pending divorce, then. It’s just semantics.” She looks at me over her bare shoulder, an injured look in her eyes. “You think I’d ask you to make love to me if there was a chance my husband and I would get back together?”

This is one of those moments where we make a heaven or hell of the future, by choosing honesty or deception. “I don’t know. You weren’t that discriminating in the past.”

She flinches, but she can endure much worse than this. “The past, the past,” she says. “The damned sacred past. Can’t we try living in the present for once?”

“Yesterday was the only free ride we’re going to get.”

She looks back into the depths of the pool. “I have a room,” she says in a deliberate voice. “It’s two doors down from yours. Why don’t we talk there?”

A room. Part of me wants to slap her for assuming so much. I move sideways so that I can see her face. “Will you really talk?”

She pulls her hair back into a thick ponytail, as though to feel the breeze on her neck. Her collarbones are sculpted ivory, creating shadowy hollows at the base of her throat.

“About what?”

“About what? Everything. Why you did what you did twenty years ago.”

“What do you mean?”

This is Kafkaesque. Can she really have edited the past so completely that she no longer remembers how badly she betrayed our dreams? “Why you disappeared for a year. Where you went. Why you ran off to Virginia. Why you treated me like a stranger when I flew up to ask you to get your father to drop the suit.”

She turns to me and lets her hair fall, and whatever mask she was maintaining falls with it. She looks more vulnerable than I have ever seen her, and when she speaks, her voice is stripped of all affect. “Penn, I can’t do it.”

“Livy, if I understood some of those things, I might . . . well—things might not have to happen the way they are.”

“What do you mean? If I answer your questions, you’ll withdraw the charges you made against my father?”

I don’t know what I mean. I started into the Del Payton case to destroy Leo Marston, but compared to understanding the mysteries that shaped my life, revenge seems meaningless. Of course, there is still Del Payton. And Althea. And the small matter of justice—

“I can’t pull out of the Payton case now. It’s too late for that. But I can pursue it a different way. If your father’s part was only—”