“So we’re all right?” he said. “You’re still with me?”

The sun was dropping into the sea. Iris’s heart pounded so hard, her chest might explode—not because she was scared but because she understood that everything depended upon this moment, this conversation, this decision. The entire course of her life pivoted around this point of vital contact, his forehead against hers.

When Iris nodded, Sasha’s head moved too.

He let out a noise of exultation and crushed out his cigarette on the bricks and kissed her—unbuttoned her dress—kissed her neck and breasts—all the familiar rituals. He untucked his shirt and Iris fumbled with the fastening on his trousers. On this wall nobody could see them or hear them—the ancient Sabine Hills rose up behind them—the sun set in unspeakable splendor behind Sasha’s head. The bricks left angry marks on the backs of her thighs. She discovered them the next day, when Sasha bathed her in the stream at the corner of the garden, before they returned to Rome.

By then she’d forgotten how his hands shook when he returned from meeting his Soviet contact in Tivoli, how full of nerves he was.

EARLY IN THE MORNING of Friday, the tenth of May, a ringing telephone woke Iris. Sasha stirred next to her and stumbled out of bed. The air was warm and dusky; she couldn’t see any sunlight through the cracks of the blinds. She flopped on her back and listened to Sasha’s low voice in the other room. Once he left for the embassy, she was supposed to return home to the apartment she shared with Ruth, cheerful and rested from her sketching holiday, and she didn’t know how she was going to do that. She wasn’t that Iris anymore. Her life was here, next to Sasha.

Sasha said clearly, All right, I’ll be there in half an hour, and the receiver rattled into its cradle. His footsteps treaded the floorboards back toward her. She stretched her hands above her head in hopes of enticing him, but he just sat on the edge of the bed, naked and somber, and said, Well, it’s begun.

She didn’t need to ask what had begun. Nor did she need to ask why he wasn’t surprised.

Ruth

JUNE 1952

New York City

Remarkably enough, the house telephone rings precisely eleven minutes after I hang up the line from the Empire Hotel—remarkably, because I can’t think of a method other than rocket propulsion that could have made the journey in so little time. Like many of Sumner Fox’s feats, it remains an unexplained miracle.

“Gentleman to see you, Miss Macallister,” says the doorman, perfectly neutral because I tip well at Christmas. “A Mr. Fox?”