As she straightened, she saw Sasha take a piece of paper from his hymnal and tuck it into his jacket pocket, singing lustily as he did so—Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire.

The nick was bleeding again, but this time Iris didn’t try to stop it.

SINCE THE LONG-AGO DAY in Tivoli, when Iris confronted Sasha about the envelope in his suitcase and the woman he used to meet in the Borghese gardens, they’d only once discussed the subject. That was in December of 1941, after Pearl Harbor, when the US embassy in Rome was hastily closed on account of war, and they’d moved back to the United States in an almighty hustle. On the promenade deck of the steamship bound for New York one stormy afternoon, staring nervously out to sea for the possibility of German submarines, Iris had looked around to make sure nobody could hear them and said to Sasha, “I suppose this makes your work a little easier, doesn’t it? Now that we’re all fighting on the same side?”

He’d looked down at her incredulously. “What work?”

“I mean what you were doing with the envelopes and the . . . the woman you used to meet.”

He hadn’t answered at once. They were leaning on the railing and little Kip, only a year old, lay snug in his perambulator, bundled up in blankets and fast asleep. Iris remembered how taut Sasha’s face looked. He’d worked without sleep for days, rolling up all the affairs at the embassy, and now he seemed to have fallen out of the habit of sleeping. He would go to bed long after Iris and wake up earlier, and during the night, if Kip stirred, he told Iris to go back to sleep, he would take care of the boy. So he was tired, but he wasn’t exhausted; it was the insomnia of the newly awakened, of somebody too thrilled with the possibilities of life to waste valuable minutes unconscious.

“Listen,” he’d said at last, “I was wrong to tell you about that. You should just forget we ever had that conversation.”

Iris was devastated. “I don’t understand. Don’t you trust me anymore?”

Sasha had turned and gathered her up against his thick, damp overcoat. “Darling, I trust you more than ever. You mean more to me than ever, a thousand times more. It’s why I can’t say a word to you. Not even if it kills me to hold back.”

“You need to talk to somebody,” she said. “You can’t do this all alone.”

“Just forget I ever said anything. Forget you ever knew anything. That’s all.”