The deja vu is almost too powerful to endure. Livy and I once sat in the dark while she told me the story of being raped by a high school football player during a date. Twenty years later, only the context has changed.

"I'm sorry. I had no idea. I couldn't even have imagined that."

"But isn't it such a touching little story?" Her tears are rolling down her cheeks now. "Ray Presley, proud father of my first and only child."

I want to hold her, but I think she would probably hit me if I touched her.

"I couldn't believe I even conceived," she says, wiping her face. "But I did. And you think I should have welcomed Jenny with open arms." She modulates her voice into a hysterical exaggeration of a TV mom: "Hello, sweetheart! Where have you been all my life? Give Mama a hug!"

The delirium in her voice sends chills through me. "Jenny had nothing to do with what Presley did to you that night."

"She is that night to me! Don't you get that? Do you think I could ever look at her without reliving every second of those rapes?"

I shrug and stay silent. I am not a woman. I can't know. "When I told you Presley was coming to kill your father, you said you hoped he would come."

"I'd kill him in a minute," she says in a flat voice. "Like stepping on a cockroach."

"I knew it was something like this. Something dark."

"Dark? The whole thing is so Sally Jessy Raphael it makes me want to vomit."

"You didn't tell your father Presley had raped you?"

A shadow of shame crosses her face. "No. I'd started the whole thing, hadn't I? I suppose I could have lied and said he attacked me out of the blue, but my father is pretty hard to lie to. He's scary that way. He sees dishonesty in people."

"Maybe because he's so dishonest himself."

"Don't, Penn."

"But he knew you were pregnant. Eventually, I mean."

She nods. "My sister told him. She'd gotten pregnant three years before, and Daddy made her get an abortion. It really messed her up. Our great Catholic parents practically forcing her to terminate her pregnancy. You'd think that when I turned up pregnant, she would have done all she could to help me hide it. But she'd felt inferior to me her whole life. I was the special one, the adored one. She just had to tell them that I'd screwed up as badly as she had."

"Livy, why in God's name did you have the baby? Under the circumstances-"

"Under the circumstances, I wasn't thinking rationally, okay? After the rape I was so upset, I went to Radcliffe a week early. Two months later, when I found out for sure I was pregnant, I thought about terminating it. But then my sister blabbed, and the next thing I knew, my father was in Cambridge trying to force me to have an abortion. You know how he and I are. The simple fact that he tried to force me was enough to make me refuse, especially after all the lip service he'd paid to Catholic dogma. But more than that, the pregnancy gave me a chance I'd never had before. An absolute excuse to break the pattern laid out for me before I was born. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew I didn't want to spend four years at Ole Miss in a sorority full of girls majoring in fashion merchandising and looking for husbands."

"Thanks for telling me in time to change my plans."

A momentary look of penitence. "I'm sorry about that. I never told you to go there."

"No. You just talked about how wonderful it would be if we were both there. What I can't believe is that you let your parents think I had gotten you pregnant. You did, didn't you? That's the root of all the pain that came after."

She takes a deep breath and sighs. "I suppose I did."

"Suppose, nothing. You didn't have the guts to admit you teased Ray Presley into raping you, but you didn't mind letting me take the blame for knocking you up."

"Penn, you don't understand. When Ray took me home that night, he threatened me. He said that if I told my father what had happened, he'd kill my mother."

"Your mother?"

"He knew I wouldn't care about myself. Ray said my father might kill him for hurting me, but he'd thank him for killing my mother. And on some level… I felt like he might be right. Daddy was such a bastard to Mother back then."

A wave of shame rolls through me, shame for thinking Livy was so selfish and shallow that she would let my family pay for something that was someone else's fault without any excuse. But the shame passes quickly. Livy is twisting the truth even now.

"You're lying. I don't mean about the threat. I'm sure Presley threatened you. But you've always cared about yourself. More than anything else. And I don't think you would have bought Ray's threat, not for long. He was scared shitless of your father. He still is, in some ways. And when Leo decided to go after my father out of revenge, you could have spoken up. You could have said, Daddy, it wasn't Penn. But you didn't. You knew why he took that suit, and you never said a damn word to change his mind."

"It was too late by then. I was at Virginia and-"

"I flew up there to see you! And you said nothing. You're gutless, Livy. I never knew that about you until now."

"I suppose I am. About the big things."

"Just like your father. He wanted a man dead, but he didn't have the balls to do it himself. He was district attorney, and he arranged to have an innocent man killed for profit."

"That is such bullshit."

"You think so? You'll find out different tomorrow. Your father and Ray Presley set up one of the most heinous murders I've ever come across, and J. Edgar Hoover covered it up to keep your grandfather happy. To keep them pulling for Nixon in the sixty-eight election."

"What are you babbling about?"

"Never mind."

Her face has taken on a strange cast. "I met him once, you know. Hoover. When I was a little girl. Up in Jackson with my father."

"Oh, they were big buddies. And the root of their friendship was the murder of Del Payton."

She shakes her head as if I'm hopelessly insane.

"By sundown tomorrow your father will be indicted for murder, unless he can kill my witnesses. And he's trying hard, believe me."

"What are you talking about?"

"Your father and John Portman tried to kill me last night."

She shakes her head. "You're lying."

"When have you known me to lie, Livy? Ever? Your father killed for money and power in 1968, and he'll do it now to cover his ass. That's all he's ever been about. He's played every angle and skimmed every deal, from factory locations to backroom adoptions. Everything's money to him."

Livy has gone still. "What do you mean, backroom adoptions?"

"Come on. That can't be news to you. I saw a record of the private adoptions he handled over the years. He did about twenty of them, and yours was one. Jenny's, I mean. For big money too. Big for those days, anyway."

She reaches out and touches my arm. "Tell me what you're talking about."

"You really don't know? Remember those records you and Leo took out of his office last week? The ones he tried to burn?"

"Yes." -

"There was a scrap of paper in there, a record of income from adoptions. He pocketed thirty-five grand off of yours. One of the highest prices paid for any baby on the list. I guess he wanted top dollar, since the baby came from his gene pool."

The blood has drained from her face.

"Look at it, if you don't believe me. I've been carrying the list around in my wallet since the day Jenny told me her story. I thought it was a record of our child being given away."

"Let me see it."

I pull out my wallet and fish the scrap of yellow paper from the bill compartment. Livy snatches it away and holds it up in the blue glow of the streetlight across the road, trying to read in the dark. Her face is in shadow, but after a few moments the paper starts to quiver in her hand.