“You deserve to be happy.” His voice is lower now, as if he said it more to himself than me. He looks up at Trinity Church, across the street, and something mournful passes over his face. He was going to be a priest and he gave it up for the love of a girl who doesn’t love him back. I wonder if that look is for her, or for what he gave up because of her.

We reach my door and I turn to him. “So, did we decide about the Met?”

He nods. “Thursday. Meet me there, at the main entrance? Noon?”

I should say no.

I should.

“Okay.” I unlock the door and slip through to find the elevator waiting. I push four and wave through the glass as the doors close.

And wonder what the hell I’m doing.

“SO, WHAT KIND of art do you like the best?” Alessandro asks over our salads.

Instead of going to the museum cafeteria, he insisted on this swanky café, complete with a smug maître d’ and hoity-toity waiters. I feel like I’m being judged.

“Is that a trick question?” I ask, stabbing a cherry tomato, which burps a slimy pile of tiny seeds onto the white tablecloth.

His fork stops halfway to his mouth. “You don’t like art at all, do you?”

I shrug. “Not really.”

“I shouldn’t have twisted your arm into coming here.” He keeps his voice neutral, but he can’t hide the disappointment in his eyes, and it makes me wonder about the other girl. The one he loved. Was she into art? Did they curl up in bed on rainy afternoons and have long conversations about things that I don’t even have names for? All I know about art is what I learned watching The Da Vinci Code.

The truth is, if anyone else had asked me to come here, I would have said no. But something deep inside me wanted a reason to see Alessandro again. Curiosity maybe? Part of me wants to hate him, but the truth is, even after everything, I’ve never been able to find hate anywhere in me for either Alessandro or his brother. Anger? Yes. I’ve been seriously pissed off for eight years and my anger has fueled me, made me stronger. But I never hated them. “What kind of art do you like?”

“Impressionism has never been my favorite, but I can appreciate almost anything.” His sharp edges have softened a little since we walked through the doors of the museum, like being here has somehow lifted the weight of the world off his shoulders.

“I remember you always doodling,” I say, tossing my salad with my fork to mix in the ranch dressing. I hate it when it’s all in a glob. “Do you still draw?” I glance up at him when he doesn’t answer right away.

“No. Not for a long time.” His gaze locks with mine and it’s like he’s trying to see into my thoughts. He never missed much, even as a kid, but I didn’t have nearly as much to hide then. I lower my eyes, afraid he’ll see too much.

I have a flash of an image . . . Alessandro in his usual corner of the rec room with his sketch pad, so quiet, watching as Lorenzo and Eric wrestled on the floor. His eyes kept flicking to me, where I sat on the saggy couch, painting my toenails.

That was the day after Lorenzo and I slept together. I didn’t want anyone looking at me, especially Alessandro, who always seemed to see everything, so I turned sideways on the couch with my back to him.

Lorenzo usually ignored me, but Alessandro always sat next to me at dinner. After the first time, when he told me I had a good voice, he never said anything and neither did I, but it wasn’t weird. He put the sketch pad on the table between us that night and I looked at it. The sketch was of a girl in a baggy T-shirt and rolled up jeans, with her frizzy black hair falling in her face. She was perched on the edge of a sagging couch painting her toenails. You could just make out the lines of her face in the shadows of her hair, and there was a tear coursing a crooked path down her cheek.

I hated that he paid enough attention to see that.

The waiter shows up with our food and clears our salads. When Alessandro assures him we don’t need anything else, he leaves.

“There are some things I missed last time I was here,” he says, lowering his eyes to his plate and cutting a wedge off his quiche with the side of his fork. “We could start in the nineteenth-century European section?”

“Yeah, sure,” I say as he chews, ’cause it’s all Greek to me. “You’re going to tell me what’s what, right? Because I’m pretty clueless about this stuff.”

He holds up a finger, and after he swallows, he says, “I’ll tell you as much as I know, but everything’s pretty well labeled.”

“If you say so.” I’m nervous. I’m not sure why, but I don’t want to seem like a total idiot in front of him.

“So, tell me about your sister,” he says and my stomach lurches.

“What about her?”

There’s an edge to my voice, and hearing it, his gaze lifts from his plate and questions me.

“She’s great,” I say, preempting his next question, which would be some version of “What’s wrong?” “She’s married to a great guy and they have two great kids and they’re great.”

“Boys or girls?”

“Boys.”

“And you’re their favorite aunt, I’m sure,” he says with half an amused smile.

Despite the knot in my stomach, I can’t help smiling back. “Something like that.”

“Do you enjoy children?”

“What do you mean?”

He lowers his fork to his plate. “I mean, are you a kid person? Do you want children of your own?”

“Hell, no!” I say, but then amend, “I mean, Henri and Max are fun, and I like hanging out with them, but I don’t want any of my own.”

He tips his head at me. “Why not?”

I shrug. “Some people just aren’t cut out to be parents, you know?”

He nods. “I struggle with that. I’m not convinced I’d make a good father, but I can’t deny the part of me that desperately wants a family—children of my own. Lots of them.”

I look down at my plate and twirl my pasta. “You need to find someone who feels the same way for that.”

“This is true.” He picks up his fork and his eyes study my face as he takes another bite. “Were you were happy living with your sister and her family?”

I relax a little. “Yeah. I was really happy there.”

“How long did you live with them?”

“I moved out about three years ago, when I was nineteen.”

“Did you go to college?”

What is this, twenty questions? “No,” I say a little defensively.

His gaze finds mine again. “Why not?”

“Because . . . I don’t know. I didn’t want to go right out of high school. I took a couple of community-college classes to keep Mallory off my back, but I really just wanted to act. And then American Idol happened and I started getting auditions and moved into the city and . . . I just never wanted to go.”

He holds my gaze. “No judgment, Hilary. I’m just curious.”

I look down as I twirl my pasta on my fork.

When we’re done and Alessandro pays, he leads me up to the second floor. There’s a long gallery with paintings on the walls and statues on pedestals. At each one, we stop and read the plaque that tells us what it is. Occasionally, he tells me things that aren’t on the plaque—like how the artist died, or who he trained with. He seems even more relaxed here than he did over lunch, and I realize, what walking in the rain does for me, art does for him.

About halfway down, we come to a painting that looks different from the others. It’s of a woman in a gold-yellow dress with black curly hair, sitting there staring off the canvas at us. She’s pretty in a sort of unique way and she looks like she wouldn’t take crap from anyone.

“Henri Regnault’s Salomé,” Alessandro says. “It’s one of the signature pieces of the Romantic movement.”

“I like it. She looks like she has her shit together.” My eyes flick to the plaque next to the painting and I run a finger under the artist’s name. “Henri . . . It’s spelled the same as my nephew. They named him after Jeff’s dad.”