My instinct was to avoid him if I could. Not that I’d taken Renata’s side against him—I was trying to maintain a scrupulous neutrality—but on a personal level it would have felt treacherous to have a friendly conversation with him, having just parted from her.

But Gabriella spotted me, her angular, well-preserved, carefully made-up features lighting up in an oddly excited smile. She tugged at her husband’s arm and he, too, smiled when he recognized me—less dramatically, but still with an odd eagerness, as if we were much better acquainted than we really were.

Detaching themselves from their group, they squeezed through the packed room toward me. There was no possibility of avoiding them.

After offering their condolences, they brought the subject around to Marco, telling me how pleased they were that he and I had become such good friends, and how deeply touched Marco had been by my support.

Gabriella did most of the talking. Even though she’d spent most of her long life outside the world of fashion, she was still invested, in my eyes, with the glamour from her distant past as a runway model. Her firm, balletic gestures and severe upright carriage were impossible not to notice, as she stood before me, wafting a strong scent of roses. She wore a tailored jacket of ruched black chiffon with a large emerald brooch that brought out the grassy green of her eyes—the same color that glinted, in certain lights, among the browner hues of her son’s. Her voice had the trace of a Milanese accent, its liquid sibilants and refined vowels giving it a sort of furtive, corrupted, beguiling sensuality.

“Marco says you’ve been a brick, an absolute savior. He speaks of you often. I can’t tell you how grateful we are. Of course we all feel very sad for this crazy woman, don’t we, Alec? And I hope she’s getting the psychological help she so obviously needs. But as a mother, I can tell you there were times when I wanted to go to her house and strangle her!”

Alec stood beside her, nodding at intervals, frail-looking with his wisps of spun-sugar hair and shriveled pink cheeks, but with a gleam of alert intelligence in his eyes. His wren-like face had always had something impish about it, I remembered—an air of mischievous innocence that, from the research I’d done on him for my unwritten book about these characters from my parents’ world, belied a ferocious legal mind and a willingness to go to unusual lengths to win a case. Perhaps because I knew this, I had an odd feeling that under the appearance of a fragile old man conserving his energies by letting his younger wife do the talking, the reality was closer to that of some discreetly powerful sovereign carefully monitoring an ambassador to whom he had entrusted a precise and delicate task.