“Little star.” Or “little knife.” I was never quite sure of the translation.

In the scene my hair was pulled back from my face, and the camera lingered on the knowing expression in my character’s eyes, the flirtatious engagement I held with the camera.

Like I said, it hadn’t amounted to much. There’d been some modeling afterward, for an Italian department store, but that was all done.

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We were at the Purple Café, an American bar in the Testaccio district not far from the Circus Maximus. The Purple was an older place no longer in the guidebooks. Its heyday had passed, but the place could still come alive. Going there, you felt as if you had slipped back into another decade. I often felt like that. At the moment, a jazz group from Barcelona was playing.

My brother had gotten to know Orsini through one of his clients in Naples. Johnny did procurement work for a cruise line catering to wealthy travelers. He had his own reasons for introducing us, but I didn’t mind. Orsini was somewhere in his forties, not young exactly, but a good deal younger than Frank, and I was flattered by his attention. The jazz played in the background, an old tune I couldn’t quite recognize, mixed with something else, a fusion of sorts, the melody playing as if on the verge of falling apart. I could smell the crowd, the perspiration and the alcohol. Their smartphones glowed in the dark. It was a warm night, and people were looking at us, recognizing Orsini and muttering his name, his name and his wife’s, about whom there were always stories.

Orsini touched my shoulder. I wore a strapless dress and turned at his touch.

“My husband . . .”

“What about him?”

“He should be here soon,” I said. “He’s a little late.”

Orsini gave me a look. The shyness was gone. He had brown eyes, almost black. Every woman sees eyes like these on occasion—or imagines them in the shadows, like the eyes of those Italian boys down by the river. Most often, you don’t look back.

This time was different.

It was one of those moments when you feel like you are meeting a familiar, someone you knew in another life, for better or worse, and are destined to know in this one, as well.

I saw myself from that place outside myself: standing there in my strapless dress, dark eyed and foolish, a little bit gangly.

“We should find a table?”

All this while my brother stood close by watching. He smiled at me in the way only Johnny could.

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