“We’re all trapped, one way or the other.”

“You can accept it if you want, but I . . .” He engaged me with those dark eyes of his. “We need to secure ourselves a higher position.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Orsini is obsessed with you.”

“He’s married. And so am I.”

“Marriage doesn’t last forever.”

My brother’s phone chimed again. This time I didn’t ask who it might be—I knew. He left. I lay down on the bed after he was gone, in the dim light. The drug was wearing off, and I was crashing and felt that small gnawing inside, the kind that comes with cocaine. But it wasn’t simply that. There was another kind of hunger, as well. The kind you get when you’ve been to a party, and the events play through your head, and there’s something in you yet to be satisfied. I lay in that fitful way, for how long I wasn’t sure, slipping for a while into a state that was almost like a dream. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant sensation, and I was still lying there in that sort of half state when the cottage door opened and Paolo came in. I wasn’t surprised to see him, and he didn’t seem surprised that I was lying there in Isabella’s dress.

We didn’t speak.

He put his hand under the dress and lifted it up, just partway at first, then farther up, so that the shift was over my head. He kissed me on the mouth through the thin, gauzy fabric. I closed my eyes and arched my back. Frank Paris was upstairs somewhere, but I pushed him from my thoughts, pushed everything away so that it was just Paolo and me and Isabella’s dress. Then, for a little while, it was like we were figures on a canvas, a white screen, suspended in the dark.

10.

When it was over I lay with my legs and arms spread, and he lay with an arm draped over my waist. The dress lay on the floor by the bed.

“Mi ami?”

I didn’t answer.

Italian men were always asking such foolishness.

Lying there, I dreamed of home. I dreamed of strip malls and wide streets flooded with light. Of tables stacked high with blue jeans. Of endless prairies and giant yellow cups filled with soda.

I cried out.

Or I must have, because Paolo took me in his arms. We slept like that until morning, when there was the sound of keys at the door. There was no reason to be surprised, really. There was her makeup case on the wicker chair, and her overnight bag in the closet. She stepped inside. The shades were drawn, the room still in shadow. Paolo sat up in bed, and I lay stupidly against the pillow.

“Isabella,” Paolo said.