“Ah, poor old Graff! Another idiot, though admittedly a cultured idiot. He was another one who never guessed the truth. He wooed me for years, wrote me poems and passionate love letters. He idealized me just as you idealized Vinca. It’s typical of men like you. You claim to love women, but you don’t understand us and don’t want to understand us. You don’t listen to us and you refuse to hear us. As far as you’re concerned, we’re just extras in your romantic reveries.”

She quoted Stendhal: “‘From the moment you begin to be really interested in a woman, you no longer see her as she really is, but as it suits you to see her.’”

I was not about to let her get away with this pseudointellectual justification. In loving Vinca, Alexis DeVille had destroyed her, and I needed her to admit that.

“On the contrary, I knew Vinca as she really was. Or at least, I did before she met you. And I don’t remember a girl who got drunk and popped pills. She was easy prey for you, a wild, uninhibited young girl just discovering life.”

“So I perverted her, is that it?”

“No, I think you got her into booze and drugs because it clouded her judgment, made her more vulnerable.”

Teeth bared, the dogs were now brushing up against me, sniffing my hands. The Doberman pressed its snout against my thigh, forcing me back against the sofa.

“I pushed her into your father’s arms because it was the only way for us to have a baby.”

“The truth is that you’re the only one who wanted a baby.”

“No, that’s not true. Vinca wanted it too.”

“With my father? I seriously doubt it.”

“You have no right to judge us.” Alexis DeVille flew into a rage. “These days, if two women want to have a child, it’s accepted, even respected. People’s attitudes have changed, the laws have changed. Science has moved on. But back in the 1990s, the very idea was rejected, dismissed.”

“You had money; you could have gone about it a different way.”

“I didn’t have a red cent!” Alexis protested. “People aren’t always as open-minded as they seem. The DeVilles might have been from California, but their broad-mindedness was all show. My family are hypocrites, cowards, and bullies. They disapproved of my ‘lifestyle,’ my sexual orientation. For years, they cut me off. In targeting your father, we were killing two birds with one stone—we could have a child and the money we needed.”