She stepped forward.
Not beside me. Not behind me. Forward, past me, one step, which put her in the space between where I was standing and where her father was standing, which put her in the center of the room, which was not where I had positioned her and was exactly where she needed to be, and I understood in the moment she did it that this was what she had come for, not to watch, not to be present as a witness, but to be the one who stood in the center and said the thing, the specific thing that only she could say because only she had lived inside it.
I let her go.
I stayed where I was and I let her go and I watched her stand in the middle of a Rome apartment at eleven thirty at night with her coat still on and her hair loose and her hands at her sides and her back straight with the p
