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he is afraid of some things he can imagine she might want to say. And he wonders if he is foolish to open himself to the scalding shame that once was the medium in which he lived his days. But what can she say that would be worse than what he’s said to himself? Does he want her to say that he has been forgiven, does he want to hear the words “It was so long ago. I never think of it”? That would mean she never thinks of him, and he understands that he doesn’t want that.
    He says to his daughter, over breakfast, “I’m going to meet a very old friend. I’m eager to find out what’s happened to her. Do you realize, Lulu, that the amount of time I haven’t seen her is equal to twice the number of years you’ve been alive?”
    “Dad, you love making those kind of calculations,” she says, kissing him on the top of his head. “Don’t wear that shirt, it makes you look paunchy.” Has she intuited something: that he was unusually concerned about how he looked all day? “Luckily, I have my fashion adviser with me,” he says, disappearing into the bedroom and presenting himself to her in a light wool rust-colored shirt, looser fitting: a larger size. Then he is gripped by a new anxiety: in meeting Miranda in Rome, has he involved Lucy in a kind of deception, is she a partner in his infidelity? But he’s not being unfaithful; he knows that Clare would want him to speak to Miranda; she always worries that he buries too much of the past. He’ll tell her about it, of course he will, next time they talk, next Saturday. But there’s no need to make a special call to speak about it now. And he will be very careful not to say anything about his morning to his daughter.
    He sees her looking over the balustrade. How young she looks, he thinks, in her black jeans and wheat-colored jacket. He imagines that people would think she is five, even ten, years younger than he.
    She takes in the city’s expanse. She has not, for many years, lived in a large city. And the two large cities she lived in—Boston and Rome—she lived in with him. She sees that he’s uncomfortable—she recognizes, from a span of forty years, the gesture that marks his unease. His hands are in his pockets; she can’t hear the accompanying sound, but she knows that he is jingling his change. Well, then, it will be up to her. She will plunge right in with wanting the news of his family. Any beginning will be awkward, uncomfortable, the thing is to make a beginning, and as a beginning, she thinks, this is as good as many, better than most.
    She can’t bear avoiding saying things that must be said. This is, she knows, her way, a way that those who love and admire her call directness, those who dislike her call brutality. It was always her way, but her marriage to Yonatan has made it her first instinct now. Seconds after they have said hello she asks him about his mother.
    “My mother died eight years ago.”
    Miranda leans on the stone balustrade, puts her weight on it, presses into it so that the stones abrade her dry palms. She looks over the Roman morning, at Saint Peter’s and the other domes whose names she does not know but vows before she leaves she will be able to identify. The horseshoe of the Piazza del Popolo, with the obelisk that she has learned was built by the emperor Hadrian in honor of his lover Antoninus. But what are those terra-cotta-tiled domes? She will find out. Her father’s daughter: one of her first lessons: “You must know the names of things.”
    “I always thought I’d see your mother again. That one day we’d meet, and it would be as it always was.”
    “She was sad that you never got in touch.”
    “We had a difficult last meeting.”
    She will not say what is in her mind: I wanted her to be on my side, to vilify you, to be with me against you . But she wouldn’t. She said, “But you must understand he is my son. He has only one mother. I can never not be with him. I can never be against him. You want me to be