At Tuscany, Livy had told me in no uncertain terms that I was not Jenny’s father. If I wasn’t, who was? Livy delivered Jenny nine months after leaving Natchez. The father had to be someone she’d slept with immediately after that last period. Given Livy’s shadowy sexual history, that could easily be someone I did not know. But when I jerked awake last night in a clammy sweat of panic, I knew that Jenny’s father was not unknown to me. This knowledge came to me even before I consciously apprehended it, announcing itself with a wave of horror that sent me running to the bathroom.

Jenny’s father is Leo Marston.

As sickening as this idea was, I could not push it from my mind. Only this conclusion made sense of every incomprehensible action and statement that had followed, right up to the present. Livy’s inexplicable promiscuity during high school. Her mother’s chronic alcoholism. Not telling me about her pregnancy, then disappearing for a year, cutting herself off from family and friends. Starting life in Virginia as though her life in Mississippi had never existed. Settling in Atlanta. And most telling, her unwillingness to speak to Jenny even twenty years after her birth. What had seemed so cruel hours before suddenly made sense. Jenny was a living reminder of something so terrible that Livy simply could not face it. What had Livy said on the bridge, when I asked if she could ever live in Natchez again?

Not while my parents are alive . . .

The idea that Leo had sexually abused his daughter from childhood on left me feeling hollowed out, like a wasting disease. Everyone in Natchez thought Livy Marston had enjoyed the most privileged and perfect childhood anyone could, free from want, full of love and adoration. But how many times had she told me that Tuscany was a prison, not a palace? How many times did I discount her laments as the whining of a spoiled rich girl? The night we first began to get close, when she confessed the date rape by an older boy at school . . . had that been a fictionalized version of rapes by her father? Were they still going on even then? It was difficult to imagine Livy submitting to Leo’s advances at that age. He outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds, but by eighteen Livy was a strong, athletic girl. Yet I know very little about abuse, and so much human strength springs from the mind, not the body. Was Livy’s entire childhood a lie? Were her stellar performances in every facet of high school and college life part of some elaborate coping mechanism designed to conceal the awful reality she lived behind the walls of Tuscany?