“What happened with him?”

He sighs. “It’s complicated. We never had much in common. To be honest, it always felt strange that he was my brother. And then I discovered that, in fact, he wasn’t.”

“One of you was adopted?”

G let out a bitter laugh. “In a manner of speaking.”

“What does that mean?” I find I’m suddenly desperate to know just one true thing about him. Something that isn’t legend and rumor and bluster.

G shakes his head and the subtle movement away from me begins: next, he’ll roll onto his side and then with alarming efficiency and speed, he’ll be dressed and gone.

“G, tell me.” My voice is more insistent than I mean it to be.

He laughs ruefully, kisses my forehead in a way that means goodbye. “You don’t want to know, Tiger, just trust me.”

“I do want to know.” His back is to me. His feet hit the floor, and he grabs his pants. I clutch his shoulder and he turns to me, looking annoyed. He smiles as he stands up, but it isn’t a kind smile. He puts his hands on his hips, still shirtless.

“You’re like a little girl right now.”

“Fuck you, G,” I mutter, curling my knees to my chest. “Like it’s so wrong to want to know you a little bit.”

“You want to know me?” he says, crouching down and glaring at me until I have no choice but to look him in the eye. “Ha, okay, Liz, okay. Go ahead, ask whatever you want.”

“When you first met Edward in Saint-Tropez, the woman on the boat, her husband . . . were you really only trying to protect her?”

He gives me a look that makes my blood run cold. “This is a very boring question, try again.” In not answering the question, he has. I know him well enough by now to know that if he were really the hero of this story, he’d have answered me.

“Fine,” I say. “What’s the deal with your family? I’m assuming that you’re not really the illegitimate son of Juan Perón.”

He steps back and looks at me appraisingly, as though deciding whether I am worthy of knowing.

“When I was twenty-three, an old woman showed up at my door saying she was my grandmother. I didn’t believe her until she showed me pictures of my parents—who were only a little older than I was when she lost them—I was the spitting image of my father, there was no question.”

I’d read stories like this. Some of the women who marched in the Plaza de Mayo were grandmothers searching for grandchildren who were lost to them when their adult children were disappeared. Just as with my own parents, the sacred link between generations had been brutally severed.