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pleasure. Calista feels his weight, the way his body pins hers to the bed. She watches the play of sunlight on his black hair.
    â€œAh, my love,” Alexandros says. And Calista feels that the pain is worth it.

pilar
    Madrid, 1965
    ----
    Pilar is exultant. She can’t help it.
    Señor Gómez called her to his office last night. Pilar had been startled when Conchita, the surly housemaid, banged on the door of her tiny bedroom at around eight o’clock. “ Teléfono ,” she growled. Pilar had sped downstairs to the hall, where the hostel’s payphone was located. Bad news, she kept thinking. Bad news from home. Her one thought acquired a pulsebeat that set the blood pounding in her ears . I don’t want to go home. I cannot go home.
    â€œYes?” she said. “This is Pilar.” Her voice stumbled across the sharpness of the pebbles that had gathered at the base of her throat.
    â€œI need to speak to you urgently. Can you come?”
    Relief washed over her. Pilar struggled to reply. Señor Gómez had never asked to see her like this before—all of their meetings were in the mornings, early, by prior arrangement.
    â€œOf course,” she managed at last, breathless. She sped back upstairs, grabbed her jacket and her handbag, and ran back down again. Only then did Pilar realize that she had not asked Señor Gómez the reason for his urgent summons. No matter; she’d find out soon enough.
    After eight years of monthly meetings, Pilar trusted this man with her life. And so she kept on running, ignoring Sister María-Angeles’s insistent, irritated calling of her name. If she fled now, without stopping, she had a fighting chance of making it back before curfew. Sister and her irritation would just have to wait.
    â€œPilar,” Señor Gómez greeted her at the outer door of his office, delight spreading across his kindly features. “Come inside. I have some splendid news. Our bid on the apartment building in Calle de las Huertas has been accepted.”
    At first, Pilar couldn’t take it in. And then, Señor Gómez’s smile, his steady pumping of her hand, her own sudden tears made her realize: she had done it. After eight long years, she had finally done it. She had left her old life behind. She was now, at last, a grown-up at twenty-six years of age. She was an independent woman, properly in charge of her own present, her own future. She needed to answer to no man.
    Señor Gómez was, of course, the majority shareholder, but Pilar owned twenty percent of the building, with an option to buy out her business partner over the next ten years.
    Pilar loved how those words sounded: she kept repeating them to herself, silently, over and over, feeling the shape of them on her tongue. They made her want to hug someone, although probably not polite, proper Señor Gómez. Even better, it was as though a million kilometers, a million years, now separated her from the village of her birth. Gracias, Mamá , she thought. You made it all possible.
    â€œYou must be discreet,” Señor Gómez warned her. A client of his, he said, approaching the rocky shores of bankruptcy. The building was something he needed to offload quickly, unobtrusively, before it became too big a bargain for one of his many business rivals. “You must not tell anyone.”
    Pilar almost laughed. Who, she wanted to ask, would she tell?
    â€œYou must promise me, Pilar,” Señor Gómez insisted. “No whisperings to your young man, or your best friend: this must fly completely below the radar.”
    Pilar had been surprised at Señor Gómez’s assumption that she had a best friend. Even more so that she had a young man. Why on earth would she want a young man? Pilar remembered Gonzalo, his breath hot on her neck, his fingers blunt and awkward, painful and fumbling. That, followed by a baby every year until she was forty, even older than