In fact, that was how they devised this weekend—Sasha lifted his head from the pillow one afternoon and announced he wasn’t just going to hang around his apartment with Iris from Friday to Sunday, or run the risk of bumping into somebody should they venture outside. He had a friend who had a villa in Tivoli, he told her on the twenty-second of April—a friend willing to let Sasha spend the weekend there with whomever he pleased. Nobody at the embassy would know. He could borrow Harry’s car without raising any suspicions, because so far as her siblings would know, Iris had already gone off on her drawing holiday with some friends from the American Academy in Rome. Why, it was airtight! Not even Agatha Christie could have devised a better plan.

Even the weather conspired with them. Seven consecutive days of rain dampened Iris’s spirits in the last week of April, but when she walked out of the doctor’s office on the second of May a free woman, except for a cane, which was really rather stylish, the clouds parted and the sun poured down, and Iris spread out her arms and knew that everything would work out perfectly.

The next day, a Friday, she packed a small valise with sundresses and toothbrush and Pond’s cream and said good-bye to Ruth. Ruth stopped her at the door and asked if she was forgetting something?

“No, I don’t think so. What am I missing?”

Ruth made a cynical smile and nodded to the desk in the corner. “Your sketchbook and charcoals, maybe?”

The cynical smile worried Iris all the way over to Sasha’s apartment on Via Terrenzio, near the Vatican. She let herself in with the key he’d loaned her and fretted until he met her at the small trattoria around the corner for dinner at half past seven.

“You’re worried about a smile, darling?”

“You’d have to know Ruth. It’s this particular smile she wears when she knows something you don’t.”

“But she doesn’t know something you don’t.”

“Be serious.”

“Well, who cares, anyway? It’s about time she knows about us, if you ask me. Harry, too. We can’t go sneaking around forever.”

“Oh? Just when do you plan on telling them, then?”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “We’ll know when it’s time.”