We simply held each other, Luca and Fiona and I, in the quiet hospital room, while the shattered vase lay unswept on the floor and the sunlight moved slowly across the wall.

And in that quiet, I did the work of rearranging everything I thought I knew about the man I had married.

For four years, I had believed Luca was an orphan, a man alone in the world, and I had loved him partly for the gentle, self-made completeness of him, the way he seemed to have arrived in my life from nowhere, belonging only to me.

And now I knew that it had all been, in a sense, a construction, a story he had built to protect me.