I hadn’t answered either text. I wasn’t ready to let go of my farewell with Sam, and if I texted with Theo it seemed like moving on. And as much as I knew I needed to do that eventually, I wanted to make sure I was thinking about the goodbye with Sam, feeling it and what it meant for us. It wasn’t hard. Those few minutes in Sam’s apartment were unrelenting. It wasn’t so much the memory of Alyssa (although that thought tortured me when I let it) but rather the recollections of us-of his arms, our clinging to each other like the last survivors of a boat crash-that were making me sick. So sick that aside from my first big meal outside the Piazza Barberini, I’d eaten little. It was why I was fine to simply spend time in a dorm, searching around on the Internet for clues about my father, to spend my night in a tiny room wondering.

And now that I was waiting for Mayburn to call, now that I couldn’t think of anything else to do, all I could really focus on was this big, hollow-as-hell feeling and the memory of that moment with Sam, that moment that said, It’s over. Truly, truly over.

I looked at my cell phone, thought about calling him, but then I realized that a message had come in sometime during my call with Mayburn.

“Izzy,” I heard when I checked my voice mail. I knew that kind, soft voice. Lucy.

“I’m not sure where you are,” she said, “and you probably won’t recognize this number. I’m using my sister’s cell phone. She’s in town, visiting me. I don’t feel like being alone with Michael, even though we’re trying to patch things up. He swears he didn’t tape my conversations or anything in the house, but he admitted he heard me talking to you, making plans to meet you at the nature museum. I guess he’d come back in the house and I didn’t know he was there. He says he might have mentioned it to Dez. He can’t remember.” She laughed under her breath. “That sounds like such a bunch of crap when I say it out loud, but I’m still back to wanting to be a hundred percent sure before I end things with him.” A sigh. “Anyway, I wanted to see how you were. I’ve been afraid to call you because I feel like I made that whole thing happen at the museum. I shouldn’t have involved you. I’m really sorry.”

Holding the phone, I shook my head at it. It was me who had involved Lucy. I had only brought trouble into her world with the work I’d done with Mayburn. Because of me, her husband was awaiting trial on money laundering charges and a host of other things, and she was poised to be a single mom. On the other hand, Lucy had told me after Michael was arrested that she was relieved, because he had been a nightmare to live with, emotionally abusive to say the least, and when he was gone she felt she could breathe for the first time in her life.

I was staring at the phone, thinking, when it rang.

“Hey,” Mayburn said. “He’s around, and he’ll talk to us.”

“Who?”

“The reporter. Weren’t we just talking about that?”

“Yeah, but I just got a message from Lucy.”

No response.

“Mayburn?”

“What did she say?” His voice was quick, flat.

“She was calling me from her sister’s cell phone. She wanted to check on me. She was apologizing to me.”

“Jesus.”

“I know. She’s the sweetest person on the planet.”

“In the universe.”

“You miss her.”

“Yeah. But it doesn’t help to talk about it. Give me the sister’s cell-phone number.”

“Has she given it to you?”

“If she had, then why would I be asking you?”

“I’m not giving it to you. You need to let her have her space.”

“I need to make sure Lucy is okay.”

“She’s okay. You know that. You just want to call because of you, not her. You can’t take being apart from her. Believe me, I understand.”

Silence.

“I’m not giving it to you for your own good. But I’ll hold on to it, I promise. So, this reporter,” I said. “How do I talk to him?”

Mayburn exhaled. “I’ll call him and conference us in.”

“Damn, you know how to make things happen,” I said. “I appreciate this.”

“Yeah, yeah. Hold on.” There was quiet for a moment and I took a breath, staring at an old photo, cheaply framed, that hung on the dorm wall-a shot of the sun hitting the dome of a Roman church in a silvery green stream of light.

“Iz, ya there? I’ve got Stephen Gooden on the line. Steve, can you hear us?”

We all said our hellos. “So, what can I help you with?” Stephen said. He had a resonant, academic-sounding voice. “Something about the witness protection program?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s something to do with my father. I guess I’m just wondering exactly how the witness protection program works.”

“Well, for starters, there are a couple of different kinds of programs. The federal marshal program, the U.S. Attorney’s program and the state level.”

“What’s the difference between those three?”

“Well, the federal marshal’s program usually involves a witness in a case with the Justice Department or the FBI. The U.S. Attorney’s office has separate funding to protect people who might be witnesses in an upcoming case or something like that. And then there’s the state version. Local police or almost any law enforcement can put someone into protection mode. None of these programs are much fun.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re essentially social services. They set someone up with an identity, give them a little cash or a new job and turn them loose. After a year, no more financial assistance. Used to be they didn’t even provide any papers or documentation. Today, there’s still very little follow-up.”

“So, does that mean that the person can come out of hiding at anytime?”

“It’s not exactly hiding. But, yeah, it works something like that. I mean, a federal employee can’t stay with someone twenty-four hours a day in order to make sure a witness doesn’t get themselves into trouble after the case is over.”

“How do you know if someone is in the witness protection program?”

“You don’t. That’s the whole point.”

“So they just go away forever?”

“Look, do you want to tell me what drain we’re circling around? I mean, is there something more specific you want to know?” He didn’t say this unkindly. In fact, he sounded as though he wanted to help.

So I told him about my father’s helicopter accident. I told him what the flight instructor had said. “From what you’ve heard, Steve, is there any chance they faked his death and put my father in the program?”

“Doesn’t sound like it to me. In every case I’ve heard of they take the whole family.”

“What do you mean by that-‘take the whole family.”

“That’s not the right way to say it. What I mean is that they’ll usually put the entire family unit in the program. The point is to keep everyone safe. The whole faking of the death thing is really just a myth. In actuality, you disappear. They don’t tell people you died. It’s too complicated to find a body and have a funeral.”

“There was no body in this case,” Mayburn said, speaking up. “Does that red flag anything?”

“No. Like I said, they wouldn’t usually just eliminate one person. They’d make the whole family disappear.”

“The family just takes off?” I asked.

“Essentially. They say they’re moving out of town to take a new job. Sometimes, the program doesn’t let them talk at all-they just move ’em in the middle of the night. But faking deaths? The government doesn’t do that. I mean, your father would have to have been so instrumental, so key to a massive case or a huge federal program. Even then…I really doubt it.”

The disappointment, layered on top of the sagging sadness of what was left of Sam and me, made me take a few steps to the bed and fall back on it. I held the phone to my ear. I heard Mayburn asking the guy a bunch of other questions. I thanked Steve, thanked Mayburn, said it was late Rome time, and hung up.

A bouquet of sounds came from the room above me-music with loud bass, footsteps, scraping of furniture, laughing. I could almost see the group of students who were up there-I’d been one myself years ago. They were drinking Moretti beers and pulling off hunks of bread from the local market, gesturing with the bread while they talked about politics and international law and the professor who would administer their exam tomorrow.