Description: The Reckoning ONE LONDON We were nearly at the Victoria and Albert Museum when we saw the crowds spilling out of the entrance and across Cromwell Street, forcing our taxi to stop in the middle of the road. The driver turned to shrug at me and Luke as though to say we could go no farther as hundreds of people streamed toward the arched entry in a blur of color and movement like a school of fish. All there to see my exhibit. I stepped from the cab, unable to wait a second more, and my eye was drawn immediately to the tall banner hanging overhead. Lost Treasures of the Nineteenth Century, it read, the dark print striking against the shimmering orange background. Beneath the words was an image of a lady''s fan, extended to show the white satin stretched over whalebone ribs, its leash made of silk cord with a tassel curved upward like a tiger''s tail. More treasured than the painted lilies and golden roses on the front of the fan were these words scrawled by hand on its lining: Man''s love is of man''s life a thing apart, ''tis woman''s whole existence. --Byron The museum had singled out this rather small and intimate object as the crown jewel of the collection and featured it on the banner and in advertisements, bypassing works by master craftsmen and artists, and rare ethnic antiques from the Silk Road. I could well imagine the excitement of the museum worker who found the words and signature of George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron on the back of this obscure little fan. The fan was precious to me, and I''d never meant to part with it. But when we were packing up boxes to send anonymously to the V&A (shipped through my lawyer to make them untraceable back to me), I''d set it aside to return to its place on the mantel, and Luke boxed it up, thinking it a straggler from the dusty stacks of hoarded mementos to be cleared out. I wanted to get it back, but it was too late: we couldn''t think of a way to ask the museum to return it without opening the door to questions. That fan was one of the few gifts that Jonathan, my love of a lifetime, had ever given to me. After fleeing Boston, we wound up in Pisa. It was so hot that summer that Jonathan, tired of hearing me complain about the heat in our airless room at the inn, bought me the fan to cool myself. It was very fancy, meant for formal occasions, and not really suitable for my humble circumstances. But he had no idea about ladies'' fashions and no experience courting, as he''d always been the one who was pursued, and so I treasured his gift all the more for being proof that he really did love me, for he had tried to please me. As for the inscription on the back, Byron had written these words as secret solace to me, for the many times I had to hide behind my fan and say nothing as Italian ladies threw themselves at Jonathan right before my eyes. But that was in 1822, a long time ago. He was gone now and had been for three months. I was still looking up at the banner when Luke finished paying and stepped from the cab. "Ready to go, Lanny?" he asked, sliding a hand confidently to the small of my back to steer me through the crowd. His eyes were glazed with excitement. "It''s an amazing turnout. Who would''ve thought so many people would be interested in the stuff from your living room?" he joked, for he knew full well what marvels I''d kept to myself for so long. We maneuvered our way through the crowd toward the first gallery, the hall reverberating with the buzz of many conversations. I wasn''t entirely surprised that the exhibit, nicknamed "the mystery exhibit" by the press, was popular; there had been excitement in the city since the anonymous gift was announced in the papers. The Victoria and Albert wasn''t the only museum to receive mysterious donations--museums in France, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and China also received shipments of mystery treasure--but the British institution had received the most, over three hundred pieces in all. The story, splashed on news programs around the world, had generated so much curiosity that the directors at the V&A decided to quickly assemble a small show to meet public demand. Never before on public display, read the banner to our left as the queue shuffled forward. That was true: these items had spent the past century stockpiled in storage, having come into my possession as gifts or tributes or stolen outright in the case of pieces that were particularly tempting, the ones I hadn''t been able to resist. The entire divestment had come about due to Luke, really, because through him I saw my house with new eyes and realized that it had become a graveyard of keepsakes from my former lives, rooms filled to bursting with things that I''d been unable to let go. I''d accumulated and held on to these things with an irrational passion, but told myself that''s what collectors did. I see now that I lied to myself to avoid the truth, which was that I collected madly to make up for the one thing I wanted and couldn''t have: Jonathan. We turned the corner into the exhibition hall, and the very first item on display, set on its own in a box on a pedestal, was the fan. It seemed to glow in the intense spotlight shining down on it, luminous as a ghost. People crowded around the pedestal, gently buffeting me as I stared at the once familiar object. "Did Lord Byron really write that?" Luke asked me, forgetting for a moment that the people surrounding us did not know my secret. I lifted my eyebrows. "Apparently. At least, that''s what the description here says." We were trapped in the crush of people shuffling through the gallery, forcing me to share a long, silent moment with each piece. It almost seemed as though the objects were reproaching me for upending our private life and casting them out into the world. I even felt guilt at the sight of some pieces, the most intimate ones, for having let them go like this. Mostly what I felt was panic, however, at seeing my life--a life spent entirely in secrecy--put on public display. Nothing good can come of this betrayal, the pieces seemed to warn me. First was the urn that used to hold umbrellas in the entry hall of my Paris house, which my friend Savva had won from a pair of British explorers in a card game and turned out to be an Egyptian funerary urn they''d stolen from an archaeological site. Next was an Empire chair that occupied a spot on the third-floor landing: it had come from a little apartment in Helsinki where, for a brief time, I had been kept by a British officer as his mistress. As I gazed on each piece I recalled its provenance, and I should''ve been content with memories of my rich life, but I was not. I could not stop thinking about Jonathan. It was as though he were here beside me and not insensate and cold, buried in an unmarked grave in a faraway cemetery. Jonathan had been absent from my life before, but this time was different, and I felt it to the marrow. Before, I had known he was out in the world somewhere, alive but happier without me, his choice for whatever hurtful reasons he felt were justified. Now his absence was permanent. I''d loved Jonathan my entire life, all 220-odd years of it. And I was just coming to terms with the immutable fact that I would never see him again. When Jonathan returned to me, briefly, at the end, I saw that he had changed in ways I''d never have guessed. He''d stopped being the self-absorbed adolescent I had known and had gone to work in aid camps, tending to the sick and displaced, whereas I, if I were to be honest, hadn''t changed much at all. There was a part of me that believed I deserved my incurable immortal condition, a punishment meted out to me by an unspeakably cruel man. Adair had seen the bad in me, too, and known that I deserved punishment. I could only hope that I had been redeemed when I gave Jonathan oblivion, as he wished. I suspected, however, that whatever had attracted Adair had not been completely exorcised and was still inside me. I needed no more evidence than the fact that at the hospital I''d preyed on Luke, a man who''d been recently devastated by loss, to help me escape. And, of course, there was the pain of being the one who took Jonathan''s life, even if he had asked for it. That pain, I knew, would never go away. I shook my head to drive out the thought; today was about saying good-bye to the past and embracing the present. "Are you okay?" Luke asked suddenly, snapping me out of my thoughts. "I am. It''s just . . ." "Overwhelming. I understand." He touched my cheek; perhaps I looked flushed. "Maybe it wasn''t a good idea to come. . . . Do you want to leave?" "No, not yet." I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back. We continued to inch along, and while Luke focused on the exhibit, I studied his features in profile. He was oblivious to my eyes on him, fixated instead on the pieces in the display cases. Luke didn''t think of himself as good-looking, particularly in comparison to the perfect physical specimen that was Jonathan, whom Luke had seen for himself in the morgue. I tried to make him understand that he had his own kind of appeal. We made a handsome couple, Luke and I, if lopsided in age. In public, he was likely taken for the father figure while I was cast as the infatuated girl. No one who saw us would suspect it was the other way around--that I was his senior by an impossibly wide margin. The truth was I was comforta

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