Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of her. It was her, still Luciana, I had to admit it, but for a moment I thought there must be some terrible mistake. The terrible mistake of time. The cruellest revenge upon a woman, Kloster wrote, was to let ten years pass before seeing her again.

I could say that she’d put on weight, but that was the least of it. Perhaps the most appalling thing was the way the face I had once known tried to surface in her eyes, as if seeking me from a distant past, sunk in the black well of the years. She smiled with something like desperation, testing to see if she could count on even a part of the attraction she had once exerted over me. But the equivocal smile lasted only a fraction of a second, as if she knew that in a sequence of cruel amputations she had lost all her charms. My worst predictions for her appearance had come true. Her neck, the smooth neck that had come to obsess me, had thickened, and there was now an unmistakable roll of fat beneath her chin. The eyes that used to sparkle now looked small and puffy. Her mouth was drawn down at the corners in an embittered line, and it looked as if nothing had made her smile in a long time.