The formal reopening of Marcus Varro's case was announced on a Thursday afternoon, in the dry language of imperial administrative notices, which meant most of Rome almost missed it entirely.
Livia did not miss it.
She read the notice three times at the kitchen table while Gaius was out and the house was quiet, and then she folded it carefully and held it for a while, not quite crying and not quite not.
Her father was alive. He lived now in a small coastal property that had been all that remained after the confiscations — a modest house in a town a day's journey from Rome, where he kept a garden and corresponded with a small circle of old friends and had, as far as Livia knew, made a quiet peace with a diminished life. She had visited him every month since the disgrace. They did not speak of what had been taken. They spoke of the garden, and of Gaius, and of books.
She wrote to him that evening.
Father. There is news.
She traveled the following week. The coastal road in summer was beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when you are carrying important information and the world seems to want to underline itself — the sea very blue, the air warm and salt-scented, the light thick and generous.
Her father met her in the garden.
Marcus Varro at sixty-one was still recognizably the man she had grown up watching manage the affairs of Rome with the particular combination of principle and pragmatism that she had, she now realized, absorbed entirely without knowing it. The disgrace had aged him — had taken something from behind his eyes that had not entirely come back — but it had not broken him. That was the thing that mattered.
She told him everything. Not about Lucian — that was a different conversation for a different time — but about the review, the notice, the reopening. She gave him the copy of the administrative document.
He read it. Was quiet for a long moment. Then:
"Who did this?"
"I did some of it," she said honestly. "There were others."
He looked at her with the precision of a man who has read faces professionally for forty years. "You have been busy."
"I have been — less invisible than I was."
He set the document down on the garden table and looked out at his modest sea view for a while. She let him have the silence, because he needed it, because some things have to be felt before they can be spoken.
"I was not entirely innocent," he said finally. She started to speak and he raised a hand. "I knew the grain figures were irregular. I did not ask the questions I should have asked, because asking would have been inconvenient to people I needed. That is not what I was accused of — what I was accused of was considerably worse and considerably fabricated — but I was not entirely innocent, Livia. I want you to know that I know that."
"I know," she said quietly. She had known it for some time. "That doesn't change what was done to us."
"No." He picked up the document again. "No, it doesn't." He looked at her with something that was part pride and part sorrow and entirely love. "Your mother would be very proud of you."
She took his hand across the garden table and they sat in the afternoon sun, two people who had survived the same thing differently and were finding, in the particular warmth of that summer, that surviving had been worth it after all.
She stayed for three days.
On the morning she left, her father walked her to the gate and said, with the oblique precision of a former senator who had not lost his instincts: "The eastern treaty review. There is someone in Rome who has taken an unusual interest in the right things at the right moment."
Livia said nothing.
Her father kissed her forehead. "Be happy, Livia. Whatever form that takes. Be happy."
She carried that instruction back to Rome on the summer road, past the blue sea and the generous light, and when she arrived in the city she went directly to her desk and wrote a letter that said:
My father sends his thanks to Rome, though he doesn't yet know who to thank. I think he suspects. He told me to be happy.
I thought you should know.
Lucian wrote back:
I will do everything in my power to deserve that.