Ben had described her hardly at all in his letters, and Farrell’s first vision had been of a great, drowsy monolith standing above him, a menhir in a frayed flannel bathrobe. As he stood up, he saw that the broad, blunt-featured face was no older than sixty, the dark-honey skin almost without lines, and the gray eyes quick and clear and imperiously sad. But her body was as lumpy as a charwoman’s—waistless, short-legged, wide-hipped, bellied like the moon—although she carried it with all the vivid rigor of a circus wire walker, even in bedroom slippers like heaps of fluffy slush. The bathrobe was too long for her, and Farrell shivered slightly to realize that it must be Ben’s robe.

“You’re Sia,” he said. “Athanasia Sioris.”

“Oh, I know that,” she answered, “even this early. What about you? Have you decided if you’re Joe Farrell yet?”

“I’m Farrell,” he said, “but you can go back to bed anyway. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Her hair was very thick and a little coarse, gray and black together, like a winter dawn. It fell down between her shoulder blades, caught, not in a ribbon, but with a gnarled silver ring. Her eyes had almost no white to them. Farrell could see the pupils breathing slowly in the morning light, and he fancied that he felt their full weight testing his strength, as boxers will lean thoughtfully on each other in the early rounds. She said, “Am I afraid of you?”

Farrell said, “When Ben first wrote me about you, I thought you had the prettiest name in the world. I still do, except maybe for a woman named Electa Arenal de Rodriguez. It’s a close thing either way.”

“Am I afraid of you?” she asked again. “Or am I glad to see you?” Her voice was low and hoarse, the Greek accent less of a sound than an aftertaste; not unpleasant, but not an easy voice, either. He could not imagine it teasing, consoling, caressing—Christ, she’s older than his mother—or telling lies. It was a voice suited only for asking nettly questions with no safe answers.