An absent husband. A child. Surviving alone. That was enough. Though he took his arm from her grip and reached it around her shoulder and pulled her close to him until they reached her little black Opel and got in, where touching stopped.

When they reached his hotel, a former monastery with a walled-in courtyard garden, two blocks from the great lighted confluence of St.-Germain and the rue de Rennes, she stopped the car and sat looking straight ahead as if she were waiting for Austin to get out. They had made no mention of another meeting, and he was scheduled to leave in two days.

Austin sat in the dark without speaking. A police station occupied the next corner down the shadowy street. A police van had pulled up with blinking lights, and several uniformed officers in shiny white Sam Browne belts were leading a line of handcuffed men inside, the prisoners’ heads all bowed like penitents. It was April, and the street surface glistened in the damp spring air.

This was the point, of course, to ask her to come inside with him if such a thing was ever to be. But it was clearly the furthest thing from possibility, and each of them knew it. And apart from privately acknowledging that much, Austin had no real thought of it. Although he wanted to do something good, something unusual that would please her and make them both know an occurrence slightly out of the ordinary had taken place tonight—an occurrence they could both feel good about when they were alone in bed, even if in fact nothing much had taken place.

His mind was working on what that extra-ordinary something might be, the thing you did if you didn't make love to a woman. A gesture. A word. What?

All the prisoners were finally led into the police station, and the officers had gotten back in their van and driven it straight up rue de Mézières, where Austin and Joséphine Belliard were sitting in the silent darkness. Obviously she was waiting for him to get out, and he was in a quandary about what to do. Though it was a moment he relished, the exquisite moment before anything is acted on and when all is potential, before life turns this way or that—toward regret or pleasure or happiness, toward one kind of permanence or another. It was a wonderful, tantalizing, important moment, one worth preserving, and he knew she knew it as well as he did and wanted it to last as long as he wanted it to.

Austin sat with his hands in his lap, feeling large and cumbersome inside the tiny car, listening to himself breathe, conscious he was on the verge of what he hoped would be the right—rightest—gesture. She hadn't moved. The car was idling, its headlights shining weakly on the empty street, the dashboard instruments turning the interior air faintly green.

Austin abruptly—or so it felt to him—reached across the space between them, took Joséphine's small, warm hand off the steering wheel and held it between his two large equally warm ones like a sandwich, though in a way that would also seem protective. He would be protective of her, guard her from some as yet unnamed harm or from her own concealed urges, though most immediately from himself, since he realized it was her reluctance more than his that kept them apart now, kept them from parking the car and going inside and spending the night in each other's arms.

He squeezed her hand tightly, then eased up.

“I'd like to make you happy somehow,” he said in a sincere voice, and waited while Joséphine said nothing. She did not remove her hand, but neither did she answer. It was as if what he'd said didn't mean anything, or that possibly she wasn't even listening to him. “It's just human,” Austin said, as though she had said something back, had said, “Why?” or “Don't try,” or “You couldn't possibly,” or “It's too late.”

“What?” She looked at him for the first time since they'd stopped. “It's what?” She had not understood him.

“It's only human to want to make someone happy,” Austin said, holding her warm, nearly weightless hand. “I like you very much, you know that.” These were the right words, as ordinary as they sounded.

“Yes. Well. For what?” Joséphine said in a cold voice. “You are married. You have a wife.