To start: a dignified greeting between adults for whom bygones were bygones. Followed by: quiet appraisal. “I’m curious, Antonio . . . What was it about for you? What were you thinking?” My natural reticence, my skills in withholding and listening, would give him the chance to account for entering into a correspondence with Maddy behind my back, before I had to divulge anything myself. I would listen graciously as he spoke of his wife and children. Then I would tell him. My rehearsals never got past that point. Obviously it was better to inform him in person than any other way. That’s what I had decided, and there was no going back on it now.

“Never?” I said. “You never, ever want to have a child?”

He paused long enough to tell me what I needed to know.

“What you mean is, you don’t want to have one with me.”

My triumph had been raising her on my own. After turning us down in favor of his own plans and interests, or what he took them to be, Antonio had burrowed back into our lives just when we were at our most defenseless. He was lucky I wanted to see him at all.

To keep my eyes from the door, I read the plaque again, concentrating on details I’d missed the first time. The squalid conditions in which urban cattle were kept. The unhealthy character of London milk. The cow with the iron tail—

He was beside me. He had slipped in. There he stood, blocking the light and taking up all the air, his face a compelling variant of the one I had known so well. His hair was shorter and more barbered, the reddish brown sparked now with gray. His eyes sat more deeply in his head and were ringed with fine tucks and creases. I could not speak. The presence of this living, latter-day Antonio was wondrous and unreal, like seeing photographs of my parents in their youth, only in reverse. The table was between us. I forced myself to stand. As I stood, dread rushed in and I felt like I was in one of those dreams where I had committed an appalling act that could not be undone.

You can’t give someone news like this in a pizza place!

Antonio moved toward me, extending his hands to take both of mine, a courtly gesture I remembered well. He lowered his gaze and raised it suddenly, a habit of Maddy’s, and smiled at me with her shy, generous smile. The shame of it flooded through me: that Maddy had not made it, that I had brought her into the world and failed to save her, that her father was here and I could not show her to him.