I have no response to this. Caitlin matters to me, but right now there is a motor spinning in my chest, driving me irresistibly toward Tuscany, the only place where the truth of my life can be found. “It could be, someday. But it’s not now. Let me by, Caitlin.”

She hesitates, then drops my wrist and moves aside.

Kelly starts to fall into step with me.

“Stay here,” I tell him. “I don’t need you for this.”

He stops, but before the main door closes behind me, I hear Caitlin say, “Go with him.”

Tuscany is a magnificent mansion, but it would look incomplete without the indelible image of Livy standing on the gallery. She’s wearing a royal blue sun dress, belted at the waist and falling just below her knees. The air is cool beneath the trees, and the freshly fallen leaves have been gathered into random piles by the wind. The scene looks staged, like a rich color shot from an ad in Architectural Digest. Who is that beauty waiting for? you wonder as you flip past it. If only she was waiting for me.

This beauty is waiting for me. Only she has no idea what a dreadful gift I bring. The last thing she wants to receive. A demand for the truth, and the means to compel her to speak it.

I park beside the Negro lawn jockeys and remain in the car. Livy comes down the steps, her tread light, her movements graceful. Her eyes are curious as they take me in. She walks around to the passenger door, clearly wondering why I haven’t scurried around to open it for her. Unable to wait for the pretense of a drive to speak to her, I get out and address her over the gleaming black roof of the car.

“Do you know a girl named Jenny Doe?”

She freezes with her hand on the passenger door. Behind those eyes I know so well, have dreamed of for years, another pair of eyes is looking out. Frightened, hunted eyes.

“Who have you been talking to?” she asks, her voice oddly devoid of emotion.

“Does it matter? I want to know if you were pregnant in 1978.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Not my business. Is that girl our daughter, Livy?”

She takes a deep breath, recovering her composure with remarkable resilience. “No,” she says simply.

“No, she’s not my daughter? Or no, she’s not yours either?”

She purses her lips, as though calculating the impact of various replies. “Stay out of this, Penn. It’s none of your affair.”

“Were you sleeping with someone besides me in the spring of seventy-eight?”

Her eyes flash. “Weren’t you?”

My heart feels suddenly cold. “No. But if you were, how do you know for certain who the father was?”

“Maybe I don’t care who it was.”

The steel in her voice cannot mask the fear and anguish in her face. “Livy—”