Costanza wrote to him about her time with her mother, which, as she predicted, had not been easy, and her visits elsewhere in Italy, to friends and relatives. He wrote her about the rest of his trip, his return to New York, the winding-down late-summer IVF cycles he was overseeing at the clinic. Underneath all of these circumstantial accounts, at Henry’s end, was an eager curiosity that he had to tamp down. Exerting rare self-control, he had managed not to say outright what was on his mind. He even managed not to ask when she would be back in New York. It was obvious to Henry, even to Henry, that with Costanza it was better to hold back, to do less, where his innate tendency was to do more. And he had been rewarded for all this restraint. On Sunday evening he received a note, essentially the note he had been waiting for these past three months:

Henry, I’m here. Will you come to dinner tomorrow night at 8.00? Text only if you are not able to make it. There will be prosecco. C.

Henry glanced at his bedside clock. Between 6:15 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. there was a universe of time to be lived, thoughts to be tamed, work to be done.

Before Henry walked through the door of his medical building on York Avenue, he stopped, as was his habit, at the fruit vendor who set up his cart at the northwest corner of the intersection at Sixty-Ninth Street. After all these years the fellow recognized Henry and had bagged and ready for him a single green apple and a ripe, but not overly ripe, banana, Henry’s customary breakfast, or first breakfast, which tided him over until Wanda, his assistant, sent out for scrambled eggs and dry wheat toast in the earliest break between appointments after 10:00 a.m.