Venice
Venice passed without incident or acrimony. Rod even read chunks of his father’s diary out loud to everyone at breakfast with scarcely a groan or an unexcused absence. They listened to a description of the city as it had been in 1907—of Alexei and Maria Troy, fugitives footloose on a Continent not yet capable of imagining what might be to come, the empires and kingdoms not yet lost—the children not yet born. Troy began to think they might be able to pass for a family, after all.