“I left you with my address and you wrote me a gorgeous letter, but you included a photograph of yourself in a blue Polo shirt. "In front of my car," you'd written on the back, and the car was a cherry-red Lamborghini, but it was clearly also in motion, driving away from you. I was naïve but not entirely so, and it made me sad to think that you believed I'd believe this. And so I never answered, and I never discovered whether your gentleness that afternoon was truly kindness for a bedraggled stranger, or whether you were the predator two decades have taught me you might have been.

But this is the power of memory: the person who owns it can morph it to her desire. I'd like to judge you for the intense courtliness with which you treated me, the conversation, the sunlight in which we sat. I won't ever know the truth, but I choose to believe you were good and that your arrival took me away from worse. So thank you, Enrico Ferrante, for what didn't happen, for what you didn't do, for what I didn't find in that menacing dreamland of Palermo, for the way your gentle intervention sent me away.”