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excited, to go out to dinner with him on Wednesday night, the middle of their second week in Rome. She spent some of the money her father had given her on a new outfit—new shoes and the kind of long sweater that everyone was wearing over tights, that looked like a very short dress. She’d given Nana her Ciproxin and tucked her in with Anna Karenina —on Hildi’s e-reader, a Nook—and was admiring herself in the glass doors of one of the bookcases in the living room when she heard Nana shuffling down the hall.
    “What on earth … ?” Nana was looking at her watch, which she held in her hand.
    “I’m going out for a while,” Hildi said.
    “It’s almost nine o’clock.”
    “That’s early in Rome.”
    “But where are you going?”
    “Just out. I need to get out for a while.”
    “But we went out this morning. Doria Pamphilj. We saw Mary Magdalene Penitent and Rest on the Flight into Egypt and the Breughels. And you went out this afternoon. You did the shopping.”
    “And now I’m going out tonight. I won’t be late.”
    “But where will you go?”
    “I’m going to meet a man, okay?”
    “But how did you meet a man?”
    “He’s the mysterious passenger who got on the train in the middle of the night, like Count Vronsky.”
    “I hope his intentions are better than Count Vronsky’s.”
    “I’m twenty-five years old, Nana, and I’m going out. Do you want me to help you find your place on the Nook? Levin and Oblonsky are having dinner in a French restaurant.”
    “I’m not senile. At least Anna’s back in St. Petersburg.” She sat down on the sofa that opened into the bed that Hildi slept on.
    “There you are. Do you want me to leave my telefonino ?”
    “If your telefonino is here, then I can’t call you , can I? Besides, I don’t know how to work it anyway.”
    “I’m glad you’re starting to feel better,” Hildi said.
    “I’m not feeling better,” Nana said.
    “I’m going to meet the doctor,” Hildi said. “Dottore Tonarelli—Francesco, or Checco—at a restaurant on Via della Lungaretta. He has a cell phone. You could always call him .”
    “I see,” Nana said, and shuffled back to bed, and Hildi tried to imagine her grandmother young and in love with her Italian professor, a shadowy ghost that haunted the family archives.
    Via della Lungaretta was definitely touristy, but there weren’t that many tourists in November. Hildi stopped, as she always did, to read all the menus posted outside the restaurants, which were mostly empty. Maybe it was too early. Or maybe it was too late. She wasn’t sure. Not yet.
    Sometimes she wished she knew Italian, but she liked not knowing it too. Liked relying on other senses. Sights, sounds, smells: Christmas lights up over Via della Lungaretta, chestnuts roasting on a street corner, the lights of the little parachutes that the children launched high into the air above the piazza with a sort of slingshot, the cello player in the piazza, water gurgling in the fountain, every little corner a thing of beauty. Well, most little corners.
    She studied the menu outside Carlo Menta while she waited for Checco. It was more or less the same as all the other menus, except that it was very inexpensive. Through the window she could see that it was full of people—including children of all ages—eating and drinking, talking and laughing, the way a restaurant should be. She checked herself for nerves. None. Only a little sadness, as if she were starting down a familiar road and wasn’t sure about her own intentions. She didn’t really need another adventure.
    Checco arrived, and a girl who didn’t seem to know Italian very well—probably Albanian—showed them to a table. They ate some bread and drank some wine. Hildi told him she was going to be an undertaker.
    “An impresario funebre ,” he said, and he told her that he worked one twenty-four-hour shift a week at the guardia medica but that his real specialty was a rare pathology— linfomi