“By your family. Adopted, presumably. We know she wound up in Switzerland. But it doesn’t say when she went, whether she saw your grandfather again or whether he was dead by that time. You said he was killed in the war?” She poured him a glass of wine. “Don’t look like that. It’s the bottle you bought,” she said, “not the plonk.”

He sat in one of the armchairs and started to read. She perched on the arm beside him, no longer self-conscious of brushing against him, having to interpret when he couldn’t read a particular word or didn’t know what it meant. Occasionally he looked up, nodding. “Ah, she went to the accademia. Of course.”

Then came the mention of the Contessa Fiorito. “I know her villa,” he said. “It is now a museum of modern art. She left it to the city in her will.”

He read on. Caroline sat still and said nothing. When he came to a piece of special significance, he looked up at her. “So she wasn’t ever really his mistress. I mean, only that once. But he loved her, didn’t he?”

Caroline nodded. “Yes, he did.”

He read on. “And my father . . . ,” he said, pointing at the page, his voice cracking with emotion. “It’s all here.”

“Yes.”

When he came to the end, he closed the book and put a hand on her knee. “So that is all. We will never really know what happened. There are no more diaries?”

“Not that I have found. All we know is that she made it to Switzerland and he died.”

“I believe I was told that he was shot, trying to escape from a prison camp.”

Caroline looked up in horror. “An Allied prison camp?”

“No, a German one. It was after Italy changed sides. He was aiding the Allies.”

“Oh. How sad. I wonder if . . .” She turned away. “Never mind.”

“And all these years she never spoke about it,” Luca said.

“Not a word to anyone. We all believed she was the typical British spinster lady, refined, remote, who had never had a life of her own, outside her family.” She reached out a hand and laid it on his. “Will you come with me when I scatter her ashes?”

His fingers intertwined with hers. “Where will you do this?”

“I want to find their special tree. I thought I’d scatter the ashes around it.”

“All right.” He hesitated, then said, “Cara, I did something a little illegal.”

“Yes?” she asked nervously.

He grinned. “I bribed someone to get me my grandmother’s medical records.”

“How did you do that?”

“You don’t need to know. But I can tell you this. There is no mention of her giving birth to a child in 1940. Or at any other point.”

“I see.” She was silent for a while, and then she said, “So that proves it. It’s all true. My great-aunt was your grandmother.”