Before my story ends, I will be a murderer.

I feel you are owed some explanation for having stood by me when perhaps you should not have. But confiding my past woes to another person, especially a man, is not my strong suit. They are my problems after all and I shall pay the price of solving them.

However, I realize that my reticence is not honoring the sacrifices you’ve made on my behalf.

Why haven’t I told you earlier on why I was in Rome seeking the house of the green shutters? At first, it was a matter of trust. My secrets were dangerous to know both for myself and the person who heard them.

But as more time passed, there seemed no way to broach the topic of my past without it sounding maudlin. I do not want pity for things that happened because I was stupid and innocent.

You’ve told me you won’t leave, but perhaps after this you will? I can’t help but think that, still, it is past time you know about my past.

In the ballrooms where we’ve danced, I’ve looked around the room, realizing the irony of having escaped a madhouse to be spun about in your arms while others think I’m a countess.

Certainly, I’m not like the ladies you’ve danced and flirted with in the drawing rooms of your English mansions. Perhaps it is those differences that have made you stay with me these last two years?

I can’t help but feel that you like oddities, and I’m certainly one.

But I have never used my unnatural Persuader powers to bend your mind, to make you do what I wanted. I promise you that for that is one line I won’t cross. For my friends, I will never use my devil’s gift to convince them to go against their nature.

So if you decide to leave or stay, that decision will be wholly yours to make.

Let’s begin this tale on my sixteenth birthday. My name? We won’t use the title and name I go by now, but a sobriquet: Vivian Maxwell. Vivian is a sweet, innocent young thing who could easily be mistaken for that girl the drawing-room ballad describes as the one the hero yearns to marry.

But Vivian has no bouncy yellow curls and cornflower blue eyes. No. She has hair dark as raven wings and eyes gray as silver half-dollars. There is something unsettling about Vivian that doesn’t quite fit with the small-town girl that people want her to be.

I know you’ve struggled to place me, so let us dispense with the confusion of my origins. Vivian is from a small midwestern town in the state of Ohio, of the United States of America. That’s where she was raised and where she would have stayed until her death from old age, but a man intervened.

A man came to teach her a lesson.

I will tell you the value of men. They teach women in the harshest school — life. If you let a man be in charge, you become nothing but a puppet to dance to his tune. And sometimes the master is cruel to his little puppet. He might even cut her strings if she shows too much independence.

Or burn her.

Or imprison her in a box that he thinks she can never escape from.

Enough. I am getting ahead of myself.

Let us go back to that day Fate rolled her dice. The date? Ten years ago, on the day of my sixteenth birthday in 1894.