But he didn’t. When she was able to look up, she saw that he had actually backed away a couple of steps. He was holding his baseball cap up before him, like a shield to fend her off, and his mouth was round with shock. “Hey,” he said uncertainly. He laughed, but it was a brittle sound. “Take it easy. People are staring.”

She struggled to get herself under control. Her face felt like a soggy mass. “Well, fuck them. Even if it is a church.”

He was staring at her, eyes wide, mouth still agape.

She said, “Let’s sit down.”

“Okay. Okay. Sitting down is good—”

She grabbed his hand to stop him talking. She marched him to a pew in the nave where the sundial glistened on the marble floor.

They sat side by side, far from anybody else. He wasn’t looking at her, she realized; his gaze wandered around the paintings on the wall, the marble floor. At last he said, “Look, if you’re in some kind of trouble—”

She hissed, “Why didn’t you turn up?”

“What?”

“Here, at the baths. On Tuesday. You didn’t come.”

“Hey,” he said defensively. “So what? It wasn’t important. It was just—” He leaned forward, so he was facing away from her. “Look. You have to be realistic. I’m seventeen years old. You’re a pretty kid. And, well, that’s pretty much it.” He ticked off the points on his fingers. “I saw you in the Pantheon, and I spotted you in the park that day, and I thought, what the hell, and I said I’d meet you in the Piazza Navona, and there you were, and then—”

“And then?”

“And then you told me you were fifteen.” He shrugged. “It was just a few moments, months and months ago. It wasn’t even a date.”

“It was important to me.”

“Well, I’m sorry. How could I know?”

“Because you met me. We talked.”

“Only for a few minutes.”

But in that time, she thought, we made a connection. Or did we? She looked at him again, in his nerdish T-shirt, with his baseball cap on the wooden seat beside him. He was so young himself, she realized. He was just playing at relationships, playing at flirting. That was all he had been doing, all the time; even his supposed seriousness was just part of the game. Hope started to die.

He said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Really. And anyhow, I did like you, you know.”

She sighed. “Look, I don’t blame you. The irony of it is, with almost anybody you met it would have made no difference.”