Sasha’s eyebrows rose. “Yes, some man, undoubtedly. Nobody takes a woman’s art seriously. Not even women.”

“Of course not. It’s too sentimental, isn’t it? Too banal or trivial or domestic. Not important enough.”

“What’s important,” Sasha said, “is what’s important to you.”

“Oh, that’s easy to say—”

“No, I mean it. As long as you know you’ve done something worthwhile.”

“But what use is that? If nobody else cares. If nobody else sees.”

“I care.” He set his fingertips on the sketchbook like a spider. “I see them.”

He wasn’t looking at the drawings, though. He was looking at her—so earnestly that Iris thought maybe he was looking at the ugly bruise on her cheekbone, or a smear of dirt, or some other mesmerizing flaw. She flexed her fingers around the empty glass. She had something to say, but she didn’t know how to put it into words. There was nothing in the whole English language that could express what she was thinking.

Sasha turned his head away. He lifted her hairbrush and ran his thumb along the bristles, put it down and examined a lampshade—a book—he grunted when he saw the title, The Good Earth—approval or disapproval?—the cheap fountain pen on her desk. When he set the pen down again, it rolled right to the edge, and he caught it just in time, though his head had already turned in the opposite direction, toward the mirror above the dresser. Iris could just see the reflection of the left side of his face, and it startled her. He looked so old! Not like an old man, of course, but a man of experience. Worldly. A dozen years older than she was.

But—he was nervous! He was more nervous than he was in the hospital, when he all but admitted that he was in love with her—yes, she was sure of it, he was in love with her!—all because he was in her bedroom now, not a hospital room, and there was no nurse hovering by the door and no sister in the other room—nobody at all but the two of them.

His eyes met hers in the mirror and looked swiftly away.

A burst of joy rushed all the way to Iris’s fingertips. Joy and—what’s the word?—not so much confidence as sureness, the knowledge that she was absolutely right, that their meeting here in Rome, two American misfits who belonged to nobody else, bore the fingerprint of fate. She could say this to herself—fingerprint of fate—because she was a romantic and so was he.