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but enough, more than she had ever known. Her mind free from workaday worries, she had all the time in the world to dwell on what had gone wrong and could never be made right. What if she—? What if he—? What if they—? Bridgeville, Hell -aware. Most people would think it was a better fate than she deserved.
    They would be right.
    AMO, AMAS, AMAT
    I WAS FIVE WHEN MY FATHER decided that I should start studying Latin and Greek. No one found this odd. He was, after all, a professor of the classics. He had named me for Cassandra, the ignored prophetess. This was after my mother refused to consider Antigone, Aphrodite, Andromeda, Atalanta, Artemis, any of the nine Muses, or—his personal favorite—Athena. After all, Athena sprang, fully formed, from her father’s head, while her mother, Metis, remained imprisoned inside. My father admired this arrangement.
    My mother would have preferred to call me Diana, as Artemis is known in Roman mythology. But my father hated the Roman names and often railed at their primacy in our culture. When I had to learn the names of the planets, I couldn’t rely on mnemonic devices— My very elegant mother just served us nine pickles —because I had to transpose them in my head: Hermes, Aphrodite, Earth (“Gaia!” my father would correct with a bark), Ares, Zeus, Cronus, Uranus (“The one Greek in a batch of Romans, that sly dog, and incestuous to boot,” my father liked to say), Poseidon, Hades.
    Again, no one found this odd, least of all me. My father was a man of many emphatic opinions, which he announced with the same vehemence of callers to WBAL shouting about the Orioles and the Colts. The Greek gods were preferable to the Romans. Nixon was a criminal—my father’sverdict long before Watergate. Mr. Bubble was bad for the skin and the plumbing. Jiffy Pop would give you cancer. Pornography was preferable to any ghostwritten syndicate novel, such as Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Girls should not wear their hair short.
    The last, at least, was mounted in my defense, when my exasperated mother wanted to chop mine off because I fought so during shampoos. “You take over her hair,” she challenged my father, and he did, finding a gentle cream rinse and a wide-tooth comb that tamed my unruly mane. “It’s too much hair for a girl, but you’ll be glad when you’re a woman,” he often said. One of my happiest memories is of standing in the never-quite-finished bathroom off my parents’ bedroom, my father pulling the comb through my hair, insistent but never cruel. My father—incapable of throwing a ball, bored by most sports—would have been lost with a son. The only man he understood was himself.
    So, in the world according to Ric Fallows, insisting on language lessons for his only child was not at all strange. But everyone wondered why my father didn’t tutor me himself. He could read both languages, although he was far more skilled in Latin. Instead, my father took me to the home of a faculty colleague, Joseph Lovejoy, whom I was instructed to call Mr. Joe, in the Baltimore fashion.
    Mr. Joe and his sister, Miss Jill, lived in our neighborhood in a place I liked to call the upside-down house. It was built into a bluff above the Gwynns Falls, with the living room on the top floor, the next floor down housing the kitchen and dining room, and the bedrooms on the garden level. Mr. Joe sat with me in the study on the top floor, while my father helped Miss Jill prepare tea—not just the beverage but a proper tea of sandwiches and sweets. The Lovejoys were British, visiting Baltimore on some kind of academic exchange program. Miss Jill had what my father called that famous English skin, although it looked like anyone else’s skin to me. Mr. Joe was tall and gaunt, and he had skin that no country would claim.
    One particularly warm Saturday afternoon in May, the teakettlewhistled on the floor below