But the next day, standing in the meadow, he invites Anna to visit the trailer, and she hesitates, thinking the offer is a commitment on his part, even a tentative one. It implies too much knowledge of the other—his home could be a capsule of the past or of a possible future. Her own hesitation at breaking their formality is interpreted by Rafael as shyness, or modesty, or a desire not to take the relationship further. And in some way this is not a misinterpretation of Anna. For she too has lived a stranger’s life. There are layers of compulsive secrecy in her. She knows there is a ‘flock’ of Annas, and that the Anna beside this unnamed river of Rafael’s is not the Anna giving a seminar at Berkeley on one of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers, is not the Anna in San Francisco walking into Tosca’s or eating at the Tadich Grill on California Street.