Iris crossed her heart.

He leaned his head toward her and spoke in a stage whisper. “Cornelius Alexander Digby.”

“That’s awful.”

“Named for my father, who was named for my grandfather. Father being the old throwback he was, there wasn’t any question of naming me something else. But my mother insisted on calling me Sasha. Probably it’s why they divorced, in the end. The affairs he could pretend not to notice, but the nickname just rankled.”

Iris couldn’t help laughing. It was the tone of his voice, as if he were gossiping about film stars or something, not his own parents. She thought it was almost worth breaking her ankle to sit in a private room with this tall Apollo and laugh, the way you laughed with a friend of long standing—someone you trusted. Then the laughter died away. Iris glanced at his face—the thoughtful way he dragged on his cigarette, looking at her.

“You’d better put that out,” she said. “The nurse will come back any minute, especially if she sees the door closed.”

“Oh, hang the nurse.” But he rose anyway and stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill.

“You’re awfully sweet to visit me like this. I hope you’re not feeling guilty.”

“I am feeling guilty, but that’s not the reason I visit you.” He tossed the spent cigarette out the window and came to sit on the edge of the bed. With his thumb he brushed the bruise on her cheek. “You have a black eye, did you know that?”

Iris gasped and threw her hand up to cover the eye in question. “Nobody told me!”

“Don’t worry, I’ve seen worse. It wasn’t a direct hit. Anyway, you still look beautiful.” Now he touched the bandage on her forehead that covered eight stitches near her hairline. “The thing about growing up everywhere, you don’t feel you belong anywhere. You see things, terrible things, people living—no, existing, hardly even that—just surviving in the most abject conditions, and when you return to a place like East Hampton, for example, and the Schuylers and the van der Wahls playing endless tennis at the club, drinking endless silly cocktails and having conversations that—well, you know what I mean, don’t you? It’s as if they can’t see anything beyond their little world and the little people in it—”

“Yes, I know!” she said eagerly.

Sasha let out a long sigh, almost like relief. “I thought you would. Anyway, that’s why I come to visit you. I knew—when I saw you at that party, the very first moment—I thought I recognized it.”

“Recognized what?”

“You were different, that’s all. You’d understand.”