My brother shrugged. “Who knows what people do? She also keeps a suite at the hotel. As it happens, the British director is staying there, too.”

“She’s too old for the Brit.”

“That doesn’t stop anyone.”

“She’s hoping for a role herself. That’s why she was so unkind to me.” I examined the room. “This must be hers?”

I’d picked up a case by a wicker chair. Inside, I found jeweled containers filled with expensive makeup. My brother shrugged again, in his loose-jointed way. “It doesn’t matter to her. She’s got more waiting wherever she goes. And people to send fetch.”

The closet here held only part of her wardrobe, my brother explained. She had more upstairs in the main house. And more in Florence.

“A woman like her—every day is a photo shoot, whether she likes it or not. She’s flying to New York in a few days to help with the marketing of some perfume.”

A blouse hung from a hook nearby, along with a pair of velveteen pants. I recognized this as the outfit she’d had on at the party. I imagined her looking in the mirror as she changed: a body like my mother’s at the same age. I picked up her blouse, examining the delicate stitching, and then buried my nose in the expensive cloth, taking in the smell of her.

Isabella had fine taste in clothes and spent considerable time in Milan, judging from the labels. One piece caught my attention more than the others: a rather simple dress, a shift all but identical to the one she’d worn in one of her early films—the movie everyone remembered—in which she’d played an artistically inclined young vagabond wandering the countryside, taken in by this man and that, the dress growing more tattered with each adventure until eventually she was found frozen in a ditch.

“This can’t be the original.”

“There was more than one. You know movie people. The scenes were shot out of order—there were multiple copies of that dress. That one hung in mothballs down in Studio Cinecittà.”

“For how long?”

“They gave it to her recently. In a ceremony promoting the rerelease. But her body, you know, has changed.”

“More pear-shaped.”

“The dress wouldn’t quite zip in the back.”

I stood before the mirror and held the dress in front of me. I could see it would fit me fine. That it would hang on me as it had hung on Isabella all those years ago.

“Put it on.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I should go. If I can get a taxi . . .”

“You’d look good in that dress.”

“It’s Isabella’s.”

“She wasn’t so pretty as you at the same age. When she tried it on recently, it looked a bit vulgar. But on you . . .”

“I should go home.”

“It’s very late—and getting a taxi, well, as you know . . .”