Today, however, she drifted from room to room and didn’t notice a thing. Her heart skipped and raced. She was bubbling over with some giddy froth of emotion she hardly dared to name. It was like the way a child felt on Christmas Eve, if Christmas were a tall, golden-haired man who already knew your name, who thought you were different from the other girls, who’d spent an hour working up the nerve just to say hello. She stopped in front of a painting of a woman who held a small, perfect unicorn in her lap, like a cat, and she stared at that woman and thought, I know exactly how you feel!

The rain let up. Sunshine lit the windows, the watery sunshine of springtime. Iris looked out onto the gardens below, the manicured hedges in their perfect, symmetrical designs. She could almost smell the damp green scent of the dripping leaves, the wet gravel, the rich earth. A patch of blue hung above. Everything glittered, so new and promising.

On a bench along one of the side paths sat a man and a woman, part hidden by the pattern of hedges. The man wore an overcoat and a fedora. The woman wore a raincoat and a plain, round black hat. They had crossed their legs, his right and her left, to form an intimate V. They seemed to be talking to each other, even though they were staring straight ahead, into the hedge across the path. The man was long and lean, and his suit was dark blue underneath his unbuttoned overcoat. Iris couldn’t see his hair beneath that fedora, nor the color of his eyes or the shape of his nose. She couldn’t even see the pinkness of his neck.

But she saw his hands, folded on top of his thigh, bony and enormous.

After a minute or two, the man rose and held out his hand to the woman, who took it and rose too. They walked off together, down the gravel path and out of sight behind a line of plane trees.

FROM THE BORGHESE GARDENS, it was a reasonably short walk down the grand, curving Via Vittorio Emmanuel to the US embassy, where Iris’s brother, Harry, worked, processing visas for desperate Jews (though never nearly enough).

Farther down the road, and around a corner or two, Iris’s twin sister, Ruth, was modeling dresses for some fashion magazine. Unlike Iris, Ruth was tall, blond, and angular, as Aryan as they came, and she’d made quite a stir among the Italian houses since the two of them joined Harry in Rome last October. Ruth had said something over breakfast about the Spanish Steps, if the weather cleared, so they were probably setting up the cameras and the lights right now. Ruth told Iris she could come and watch, if she wanted. Iris said Sure, maybe. (When Ruth turned away to sip her coffee, Iris rolled her eyes.)