Four years earlier, fearful of the rut their relationship was falling into, she began looking for something that they might do together. She had loved to dance, once. So had he. They had met dancing. So she spent a week looking into dance classes. She found an adult class taught weekly at the community center in Grassina. She arranged with Manuela to watch Alessio one night a week, and she put a small deposit down to hold their place.

When she told Maurizio what she had done, he laughed out loud. Only after he saw how angry it had made her did he take her seriously. He told her to go without him. Take Anna; she needs something to do. Surely there are other women you could dance with.

She forfeited the deposit.

When they were together, there was little more than polite conversation. No discussions about life or death or God or health or schooling or cooking. No more discussions of art, hers or others. Nothing of beauty was ever talked about. No theology, or poetry, or philosophy. At this point she’d welcome a travelogue, but he no longer even spoke of business, where he’d been or what he’d seen. For the most part their talk had become pragmatic.

But perhaps most painful of all was that Maurizio seemed to have lost interest in her physically. He had once raved over her beauty. Tesoro mio, he called her when they first dated. My treasure. Now he did not even seem to notice her. She had no doubt that she could dress in her sexiest lingerie and parade in front of the television set during a soccer match and he would only ask her to move. She wondered if her looks had changed that much in the last six years, or if she only failed by comparison to other women younger and without blemish. Women with firmer breasts untouched by babies, with hips unbroadened and skin unstretched by childbirth.

This rejection hurt less when he was gone, and as lonesome as she was, she would take the loneliness to his rejection—a dull ache compared to a sharp sting. She could handle ache. Handling ache was simply a matter of distraction, and there was always something else to occupy her mind.

Alessio fell asleep in front of the television set. His fever had not yet broken, but his breathing seemed calm. She put away her paints and, without waking him, brought him out to the living room sofa so she could watch him while she cleaned.

Eliana kept an immaculate house. It was one part of her life where she felt in control, and as a result she had become compulsive about it. Afterward she pulled the clothes from the washer and carried them outside to hang on the line, thinking for the millionth time how much she wished she had a dryer.

Then she went into the kitchen and made two trays of chocolate chip cookies, one for them and one for their new neighbor.