She talked easily, fluently, her voice well modulated: neutrally accented English, perhaps the slightest Italian singsong. She looked at ease here. She looked Italian. Whereas I felt shabby and out of place.

The coffee arrived, which gave me a little cover.

“I don’t know what to say. What do we do, swap life stories?”

She leaned forward and put her hand on mine. “Just relax. I’m sure we will work it out.”

The sudden, unexpected touch oddly shocked me. “I don’t think I have much more to tell you anyhow,” I said. As a preliminary to our meeting I had sent her a long email from my hotel room.

“You told me about your past,” she said. “But not your future.”

“That’s a little more cloudy. I’ve come to a fork in the road, I think.”

“Because of Father’s death?”

Not Dad but Father. “I think things had been building up anyhow. I need a change.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

With that slight sharpness, she looked at me, her smile more empty. “And in return for your biography, you expect mine?”

“You’re my sister. I came all this way to meet you. Yes, I want to know what’s become of you. You sell family trees,” I said. “That’s pretty much all I know about you.”

She smiled. “That and the fact that I belong to a weirdo woo-woo cult . . . Don’t worry; I know what people think of us. All right.” In brisk, almost rehearsed phrases, she sketched her career for me, her life.

She seemed to be a kind of account manager, dealing with services and products for major clients—not individuals, but companies, universities, even churches and governments. After being sent over here by our father, she had been put through schooling good enough to get her to a baccalaureate. She hadn’t gone away to university, but, staying within the Order, had studied history and business administration to degree level. Then she had gone to work for the family firm, so to speak.

Even after this smooth patter she stayed out of focus. Thinking over what she had said, I found I couldn’t visualize her school, or even the kind of social conditions she had been brought up in—not a family, that was for sure.

She began to talk about the Order’s business. “Yes, we sell genealogy information. I brought some stuff for you to see . . .” She dug some promotional literature out of her bag: glossy, well produced. Tracing ancestry was one of the biggest growth areas on the Internet, she told me. “We’re even offering a DNA matching service,” she said. “If you’re of British ancestry, say, you’ll soon be able to tell whether you are of ancient stock, or came over with the Romans, or the Saxons, or the Vikings.