“Hey, listen. I don’t know what you were doing over there in Italy besides having melodramas with Sandro. But the place must suit you or something. You look good.”

“Thanks,” I said, fairly sure I looked no different. I was in cutoffs and knee-high socks, the men’s kind with blue and red stripes around the ribbing at the top. Those socks weren’t allowed when I was with Sandro. “Come on, seriously,” he’d say. “You’ll make me look like your father, like I’m taking you to your basketball game.”

I had on a leather jacket; maybe that was the difference Ronnie noticed. And I had the bike, outside, unseen, but it had become a kind of mental armor.

“Yeah, you look like you’ve grown up a little.” He was looking at me from various angles. “See, now you’re doing that whole smiling-woman thing. That’s good.”

I’d had a fantasy, back at Sandro’s mother’s villa, of saying something to Ronnie, letting him know he was a bastard for giving Talia my hat. But now I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Talia wasn’t here. She didn’t matter. I would make her matter by bringing her up.