“Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”

“Iris? What the hell’s going on?”

Iris set her glass on the floor, walked across the room, picked up her pocketbook from the coat stand, and walked out the door. As she left, she heard Harry’s plaintive voice posing some question to Ruth.

THE STREETS WERE WARM and wet with rain, so recently departed that the eaves dripped on Iris’s hair and shoulders and speckled her dress. As if she cared! She dodged around pedestrians and raindrops, hurried down streets and around corners, crossed the Tiber as twilight settled over the domes and rooftops of Rome. She reached Sasha’s apartment in record time, not quite half an hour, shivering a little from the evening breeze on her wet skin.

Iris loved the street where Sasha lived. It was one of those quiet, ancient side streets you sometimes found in Rome, tucked around the corner from some grand boulevard packed with shops and achingly fashionable shoppers. She loved the damp, sleepy air and the trees and especially the buildings, tall and pale and curiously austere, so that you couldn’t help but imagine what rich woods and frescoed walls existed inside. The first time Sasha unlocked the heavy, iron-barred door and ushered Iris into the vestibule and the courtyard beyond it, she thought she had never been so enchanted. She told Sasha it was like a secret garden, a fairy palace. In the late evening when they returned from Tivoli, she and Sasha had tangled together in the shadows beneath an orange tree. Iris had fallen asleep and Sasha woke her sometime during the night to carry her upstairs. The memory hurt her ribs. She actually pressed her hand there, at the intersection of bone, as she pressed the button next to his name on the brass plate. She waited for a minute before she pressed it again, although she knew he wasn’t there. Of course not. He’d be working at the embassy, working through the night, sleeping on the sofa. Nobody in the entire consulate worked harder than Sasha Digby, Harry told them. This used to make her so proud.

She rang the bell a third time and looked up and down the street. Night had arrived, everything was dark. A streetlamp gleamed against the wet cobblestones. Iris opened her pocketbook and pulled out one of the pages she’d rescued yesterday, a sketch of the façade of the Pantheon, ripped at a careless diagonal across the top. She turned it over and wrote a note to Sasha, which she folded twice into a small square and slipped into the letterbox.

When she returned home, Harry had gone, and Ruth was cleaning the dishes in her kimono. Iris stood in the kitchen doorway and said, “So what did you tell Harry?”