Costanza’s face, in sleep, was unreadable. He was grateful for that. Her unavailability—her sleep—was the only chance he had for returning to sleep himself. He rolled away from her, drew the covers up to his shoulders, and willed himself to stop thinking. Amazingly it worked.

When Henry woke up, Costanza was already out of bed, transferring folded clothes from a dresser drawer to a suitcase. She had put on a bathrobe and gathered her hair back off her face. If she’d had a shower, Henry hadn’t heard her.

“Good morning,” he said.

A strong yellow light was waiting to be freed from behind the shutters. Costanza opened them.

“Good morning.”

Squinting, he made a gesture with his hand to convey What’s going on?

“I’m sorry, but I need to get ready for my trip. I have a train to catch in two hours. My cousin Cristina is visiting from Munich this weekend. I haven’t been home since I came to Italy. It was all organized—before.”

Shoes now, into a different corner of the bag.

“That’s it?”

She nodded.

He pulled himself up on his elbow. “We kiss each other the way we did, we touch each other the way we did, and you just want to pack?”

“I have a difficult few weeks ahead. My moth—”

“So we say nothing? Plan nothing?”

She handed him his pants. “I will write to you, Henry, and you will write to me. I’m not capable of more than that right now.”

She didn’t show him to the door, but she might as well have.

Henry, bewildered, pulled on his pants, then his shirt. At the door he stopped. “I can’t leave without saying I have to see you again.”

“You will.”

Then she kissed him—on his cheek—to say goodbye.

And that was it. She did write, though. Not e-mail—letters. Her first one, sent from Recco, was waiting for him in New York when he returned from Tuscany. In it she suggested that he reply to her Fifth Avenue address; she said that, since she was not certain where she would be in the coming months, “it would be arranged” for whatever he sent to catch up with her. All her letters came without a stamp or a postmark; Henry assumed that it was “arranged” for them to travel between Italy and New York by FedEx or the equivalent and then messengered or even walked over to his apartment. He didn’t know what to make of any of this. She had mentioned that her husband’s secretary still had unfinished business with the estate. Maybe he had something to do with the way these letters arrived.