I’d arranged to meet Rosa in a little coffee bar off the Appian Way, which was where, in our brief, terse phone call, she’d said she worked. The Way is an ancient road that leads south from a gateway on the Aurelian Wall. It was a fine morning and I decided to walk, to clear my head and get my blood pumping.

But I soon regretted the decision. The road was narrow, in long stretches without pavement at all, and the traffic was as disrespectful here as in the rest of the city. But perhaps it had been so for two thousand years, I thought; I shouldn’t complain.

I survived a terrifying jog through a narrow tunnel beneath a road and rail bridge, and arrived at a junction close to a little church called Domine Quo Vadis. Across the street was a coffee bar.

And there, sitting at a pavement table, was an elegant woman in her forties. She wore a cream trouser suit. She sat easily, with her legs folded, a coffee cup before her, a cell phone in one hand. As I crossed the road she turned off the phone. She left it on the table, though, where it sat throughout our meeting, a mute reminder of her connections to another world.

When I reached the table she smiled—bright, white teeth—and stood up. She had expensive-looking sunglasses pushed up onto her brushed-back mouse-blond hair, not a streak of gray, and her eyes were as pale and smoky as my mother’s had been. “George, George . . .” It turned out I was a little taller than her, so I had to lean to let her kiss me. She buffed my cheeks, as if we were two London PRs on a routine business meeting.

But this close to her, there was something in her smell—a sweet milkiness under the cosmetics, the smell of home perhaps—that made me, briefly, want to melt. Yes, suddenly I remembered her, a little girl in bright, blurry kid-memory images I’d long lost. I found myself struggling for composure.

She pulled back and regarded me, her face so like my own, her expression cool. “Please.” She waved me to a seat. With effortless ease she called the waiter, and I ordered a cappuccino.

“So, after all this time,” I said gruffly.

She shrugged. “The situation is not of our making.”

“I know. But it’s still damn odd.”

She began talking, brightly, of the church over the road. “Have you had time to see it? Domine quo vadis—’Lord, where are you going?’ Peter had escaped from prison in Rome, and he met Jesus here and asked Him that question. Jesus replied, ‘To let myself be crucified a second time.’ He left His footprints in the road. You can see them inside the church. But if they are genuine, Christ had big feet . . .” She laughed.