“That was an hour ago. How strange.” He looked at her blindly, then glanced down at his watch. “Yes, an hour. It feels like a lifetime. In that hour you’ve told me how passionately you wanted my child, and I’ll never forget your face when you said that.” He paused. “But it didn’t prevent your going to bed with a virtual stranger, did it? You still let him cover up for you, and lie to my face—” His voice broke. “Is that love, Gini? It isn’t any love I recognize. I would have died rather than do that to you. I—look, it’s better if I just go. I can’t bear any more of this. You’ve changed, Gini.” He lifted her face up to his. “You used to be so—open. So direct. And now—you equivocate. You shift ground. You claim one truth, then deny it with your next breath. What did that to you? The war? My absence? A man you scarcely know? Tell me the truth.”

Gini looked for a long time at his face.

“All three,” she answered at last in a low voice.

She could see that the admission hurt him as much as it hurt her to make. His face contracted; then he turned away.

“That’s honest, at least. Thank you for that.” He moved to the door again, half opened it, then looked back.

“I could have kissed you then. I wanted to very much. Did you know that?”

“Yes. I did.”

“Better not to weaken in that particular way.” He shrugged. “If one’s going to do this, better to do it cleanly, don’t you think? I have to catch that plane. I’ll have moved my things out of the apartment by the time you get back. Gini, good-bye.”

And with that, just as she had expected, he left. The door closed quietly behind him. She heard his feet descend the staircase. Running first to the door, and then to the window, she saw him emerge from the entrance below. He crossed the narrow street, crossed the small park beyond at a fast pace. She watched his tall, determined figure as he receded into the distance. On the quay beyond the park he hailed a taxi and climbed into it. Indeed absolute; he never once looked back.

With tears blurring her vision, Gini ran to the bed. She picked up the letters she had written to him and pressed them tight against her chest. She felt cut to the heart by his words; it pained her deeply that he should have left these letters, these talismans. She stared at the walls of the room, with their remorseless patternings of ruins, of shepherds and nymphs. Shame and self-reproach and uncertainty washed through her mind. She thought: I could go after him—and then she felt it, welling inside her, a resistance, even a rebellion, that lay deep inside herself.

She was almost thirty years old. Her years of fertility were shortening month by month. That desire for a child—had Pascal understood, truly understood, when she spoke to him of that? He might; he might not. Oh, decide, she said to herself, beginning to pace the room, trying to force herself to think. And then it occurred to her as it had—if she were truthful—once during the previous night, that she might have conceived now, that even now, within her, infinitely small, were the beginnings of new life.