He tried again to light the cigarette, covering the match with his hand. From the corner of his mouth, he said, “You have no idea, Iris. No idea.”

“Of course I don’t. You don’t tell me a thing. You come and go and sneak notes out of hymnals—”

“What’s that?”

“I saw you. I saw you take that note out of the—” She glanced down at Jack, who dangled from her hand and jumped in an adjacent puddle. Kip had already wandered away to stand against the wall of the building, affecting an air of utter boredom, hands stuffed in the pockets of his suit like a sailor on leave whose trousers had been sliced off at the knee.

Sasha lit the cigarette at last and blew out a large cloud of smoke into the damp air. He stared at the treetops over the walls of the nearby park. “Iris, go inside. Take the boys and go inside out of the rain, all right? I’ll be home in a bit.”

“Home in a bit? Where are you going?”

He handed her the umbrella. “Out.”

Iris opened her mouth to demand where, but he’d already turned to hurry up the pavement toward Abbotsbury Road, leaving her standing by the entrance to the building with an umbrella in one hand and Jack in the other.

WITH MRS. BETTS GONE, THEIR footsteps made lonely, clattering sounds on the parquet floor of the apartment. Iris made the boys take off their shoes and raincoats. Jack ran off down the long hallway to his room, shouting something about an airplane, while Kip wandered into the living room and slumped on the sofa, where he picked up a battered paperback from between the cushions. The light was dim and gray, not July at all. Iris wandered to the window overlooking the entrance to the block, where the Peabodys were coming up the sidewalk. (The pavement, she reminded herself.) Mrs. Peabody’s arm linked through Mr. Peabody’s elbow, and a child skipped from each of their outside hands. Mr. Peabody’s damp, pink face turned toward his wife; he seemed to be laughing at something she’d said.

Well, Sasha had warned her, hadn’t he? He’d told her at the beginning that the life of a diplomat wasn’t an easy one, that you would move to one city and make a certain set of friends, and then a few years later you moved a few hundred or a few thousand miles away and had to start all over again, and how could anybody form a real friendship that way?

It doesn’t matter, she’d told him. I’ll have you. You’re all I need.