“That’s because you haven’t lost anything yet. You’re still too young.”

He couldn’t decide if she was insulting him or challenging him. “I’m not that young, you know. And I’ve lost a few things.”

“How old are you, anyway, Andrew? Eighteen?”

“In February.”

“And do you want to tell me what it is you’ve lost?”

What hadn’t he lost, really? His nuclear family, with the divorce. His grandmother, who died when he was nine. His brother, who vanished at the beginning of the summer—actually months, many months, before. His girlfriend, who broke up with him at the end of the school year.

He couldn’t say all this to her, so he went for what felt like the simplest of the three. “Well, my parents are divorced.”

“I surmised. You’re traveling alone with your father. You don’t seem like a boy who has no mother.”

“I don’t get how you can tell that.”

“Just a feeling. I don’t have a father myself. He died when I was fourteen.”

“What did he die of?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “He killed himself.”

Andrew had no idea how to respond to that.

“It’s okay to say nothing. Sometimes nothing is best.”

So he said nothing. Until they were nearly back at the meat counter.

“Can I ask if you’re Italian or if you just speak it really well?”

“I’m Italian on my mother’s side, American on my father’s. My mother’s father was the man who dried his own mushrooms. My grandparents’ house is the house that is gone. Everyone’s dead now except my mother, who lives in the north, near Genoa. And, yes, I’m here in Florence on my own.” She paused. “Have I foreseen most of your questions?”

“I guess.” Andrew’s eyes drifted down to the gold band on her finger.

As soon as they rejoined the crowd outside, Costanza glanced at her watch and told Andrew that she was late for a lunch appointment. The hat went back up; a pair of dark glasses went on. He wondered if this had to do with his asking too many questions. In parting she said, “You can find your way back to home base?” He nodded. Home base: the words felt like a gift. She bestowed them, and then she was off.

As Costanza walked away from him, he took a series of photographs of her long white form, receding. Against the chaos of the market she looked like a cross between a goddess and a ghost.

Costanza’s lunch date was with her husband, dead now almost a year to the day. She had decided that the best way to face Morton, newly resurrected a year after he’d been buried, was to take herself, and his words, somewhere public.