“Your real parents were disappeared,” I say, and then I ask the wrong question, “Do you know why?”

G laughs a horrible laugh. “They didn’t need a reason, being a university student made you automatically suspicious, you could be getting subversive ideas. They were both studying architecture.”

“How did you end up with your adopted family?”

“I was one of hundreds of babies who was ‘reappropriated’ to military families while the junta was in power. Meaning that the people I’d grown up calling my parents murdered my real parents; maybe not with their own hands but close enough. I’d always known something was off. I was only eighteen months old when they took them, but I still had memories that I could never explain. My ‘parents’ sent me to a child psychologist to convince me otherwise.”

Since I’d met him, Gianluca had never seemed quite real. He deliberately made himself larger than life with the web of mysteries and exaggerations he’d woven, more a beautiful, thrilling idea than a person. But for the first time I saw him as he was, an all-too-human man. He wasn’t trying to create a cult with his studio, he was trying to create a family. He was forever reaching for the nearest stranger because he was an eternal stranger to himself.

“Did you ever find out what happened to them?” I ask, holding his gaze.

“No,” he says. “Likely they were drugged, blindfolded, and shoved off a helicopter somewhere over the Rio de la Plata. But just like the rest, we’ll never really know. Thirty thousand civilians were ‘disappeared.’ There’s a reason we stick with that romantic term—the truth is too ugly to bear.”

“G, I’m sorry.” I try to reach for him and he yanks his arm away.

“Americans,” he says bitterly. “You come for the steak and the exchange rate, and you don’t even know what this country is.”

He’s out the door before I can say anything else.

Where Has Penny Gone?