“That looks like it hurts,” she says.

“It does,” I say.

The owner is a ringer for Sofie. I guess I’ve been coming to this café all along because she looks like Sofie and I’ve been searching for someone like Sofie. An electrical current of grief or resignation would pass through her and into me during sex. It was sort of surreal to return to my stepsister’s tender handjobs after making love to Sofie every other weekend. Between the two of them, I got used to the public expression of a private touch. Years later, my father corrected my memories when he told me that Sofie wasn’t Turkish, like I’d thought, but Serbian—Sofie was short for Sofija. This was after he had moved across the country and divorced Sofie and remarried for the third time and I had no means to contact her, nor any reason to get in touch.

I miss my wife and kids. I even miss being rocked to sleep by the ocean on our yacht after she kicked me out of the house in Los Angeles. It wasn’t misery, after all, to spend those days reading books and throwing the ones I didn’t like overboard. Because of our romance as makeshift siblings, Maddy and I must have doomed ourselves to love only other people’s children. She still lived in the city, even though I hadn’t seen her in ten years, because she never failed to send cards to the kids on their birthdays. When her own baby was born, she faithfully mailed a picture of him, but I didn’t know about it until too late. By the time I found out, she had already been taken into custody for trying to breastfeed those toddlers on a public playground. As for me, I was never upset about the fact that my wife had children from a previous marriage and didn’t want more, until I was replaced by another replacement father and found myself with no rights of custody to the boy and girl, who, over the past decade, I had come to regard as mine.

I pay my bill and head back to the hostel. I don’t much feel like joining the group for dinner, but I also don’t want to navigate the ruins in the dark. A recent flood washed out many of the wood bridges and scattered stones in the middle of footpaths, so it’s not wise to go it alone.

In the dining room, none of the food is out yet, and the Professor is the only arrival. It’s Maddy night for him tonight, so I know what he is craving while pretending to be absorbed in a book.

“What are you reading?” I ask.

“It’s a collection of fairy tales,” he says. “A French translation of the Brothers Grimm. There’s something comforting to me in reading about a child afraid of being devoured by the adult world.”

“I don’t see where you’re getting that out of it,” I say.

“Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, Red Riding Hood,” he says. “They’re all stories about the fear of being orphaned or exiled from the family and left to the mercy of monsters. Nowadays it’s the opposite, isn’t it? We’ve got the adult world afraid of being devoured by the child.”