“Do horses go faster than clipper ships? Anyway, I don’t like it. It’s too sudden. I don’t know who I am.”

He slowed and stopped at a crosswalk. “Tell me the best part of the trip. What you were saddest to leave.” Robin liked to ask for details in the form of lists. Three things I liked about my job. The worst vacation I’d ever had. My five favorite movies. He didn’t really rank experience like that; it was his way of opening up a conversation.

“Just London,” I said, not playing along. “Everything about it.”

“We’ll get you home and straight to bed.” As if sleep was the answer to changing worlds, to speaking in generalities, to whatever ailed us now.

The car lurched to a stop. Robin’s arm shot out, though my seat belt had already stopped me. He raised an apologetic hand to the honkers behind. A large woman in slippers had stepped onto the crosswalk just as we were rolling forward. First testing it with her foot, she advanced like someone crossing a rope bridge over a ravine.

“There should be a minimum speed on these crosswalks,” said Robin.

“For the pedestrians, you mean?”

“Drivers could hold up signs to say how long they’re willing to stop. Over Ninety Seconds, Can’t Make Any Promises!”

“The Risk Is Yours.” I leaned over, laughing, and kissed Robin on the border between beard and cheek. I hadn’t realized just how much space Antonio took up, with his long coat and his top-flight career and his obliviousness to the asymmetry between us: my part in his life, his part in mine.

At home I poured us both a sedative glass of wine and kept Cloud on my lap while Robin told me about his commissions, a lucrative built-in closet and a coffee table in the shape of California. I filled him in on the last interviews, my dizzy spell in the Tanks, and the opening, while the cat pushed her skull under my hand and the empty house bore down on me. I had left the country, I had come back, and still Maddy wasn’t here.

I gave Antonio no special weight alongside the other stories. I drafted in a corporate vocabulary. Seeing Antonio had been “challenging” and “valuable”; we’d spoken several times; I had not met his new family, nor did I want to. Nothing I said was, strictly speaking, untrue. Cloud left me to see if there was anything in her bowl she didn’t know about, and I ran my hand along the crack at the straight-cut end of the table. The butterfly joint that bridged it was as smooth as a scar.