When he saw I was crying in earnest, Antonio waved away the approaching waiter and stopped short of touching my arm, smiling no longer, bewildered at this turn of events and uncertain if he had a right to comfort me when we had not even said hello.

“She’s gone.” I fumbled in my bag so I would not have to look at him. “Maddy died.”

•  •  •

I had never seen Antonio cry before, even in the stifled way he was doing now, clearing his throat and blinking it back, ashamed to let me see. The contortions rendered his face older and more haggard, and at the same time as innocent as a boy’s.

“When, Eve?” he asked finally, fastening his eyes to mine. “What happened?”

He listened in silence while I told him about the year of Maddy’s illness. I hated to hear myself state the facts so coolly, one event leading to another, fixed irreversibly in place. When his eyes watered, he looked away.

“She never told me. She said you had a friend who had cancer. Why didn’t she tell me?”

I shrugged. “Why didn’t she tell me she had found you?”

“She stopped writing suddenly.”

“Was that in September? Over the summer things looked a little more hopeful. By September it had come back. They did the final scan and sent her home. She was very weak. We set up her bed in the dining room so she could be in the center of things.”

“I’m so sorry, Eve. I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it.”

By the door, the American man was holding his wife’s coat with home-on-the-range gallantry. I feared I would never see Antonio again, that this was all we would ever have. “This is strange!” I cried. “Isn’t this strange?”

Antonio hailed the waiter, who did not react to our swollen faces. We sat in silence until the bottle appeared along with a bowl of stuffed olives. Antonio poured out the glasses, released his long legs, and sat sideways, one hand on the chair back, the other doing finger exercises on the table.

“You’re thinner, Eve.”

“You’re the same, Antonio. Almost.”

“Am I?”

“I shaved my head when Maddy started chemo.”

“Your long hair . . .” he began, and did not finish.

“She made me grow mine back.”

“Oh, E-vie . . .” He separated the syllables of my name in the old way. That’s when I knew that intimacy cannot be undone.

“I wanted to tell you in person.”

“Yes.”

“I only recently found out you were writing to her.”

“I’m sorry,” said Antonio. “I’m sorry you didn’t know.”

“Can you imagine what it was like to find out after she was gone? Never to have the chance to talk to her about it?”

“I wanted her to tell you,” he said. “I stopped writing for a while, to give her a chance to tell you.”

“But she didn’t.”