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Naohiro and I exchanged glances. “His dinner?” I wondered aloud.

“Or her dinner?” said Naohiro. Either way, we decided, it was a unique French twist on the concept of carry-out food.

We reached the café—Le Flore en l’Île—and took a table overlooking the Seine. It was quiet and uncrowded on the small island, one of the few areas in Paris with no Métro stop. Only six blocks long and two blocks wide, I’d always thought of Île Saint-Louis as a lovely floating village, moored to the banks of the Seine by ropes of bridges. Always in past visits to Paris—hectic visits, during which I tried to cram six centuries of culture into a week’s stay—the day eventually arrived when I needed a brief vacation within a vacation. And always I’d head for an afternoon on the island.

Naohiro and I had just ordered a bottle of wine when we heard the music: the sounds of a cello, soft and pure, hanging in the air, then drifting out over the Seine toward the Left Bank. It was the young woman we’d followed across the bridge. Seated at the corner of the long, narrow street that runs through the island, she was playing, head tilted down, her black hair spilling like ink over her shoulders. Back and forth she drew the bow, releasing a sound of sweet innocence, like that of a child singing a nursery rhyme.

As she played, I suddenly heard the high, childish voices of my sons saying good night as they did so many years ago. Good night, Mommy, they’d sing down from their rooms. The sound echoed in my head—Good night, Mommy, Good night, Mommy—until I heard the last note reverberating from the cello into the air, where it echoed briefly before disappearing.

I sat silent, ambushed by love for my sons. And by regret. Regret for the past, when I didn’t or couldn’t give them the nurturing they needed, and regret for what they—and I—could never have back. The irony was that now, when my sons no longer needed it, my love for them was unconditional. But the past, I knew, still had the power to cast its long shadow. Sometimes, when either of my children came up against a thorny problem, I found myself worrying: did I give him what he needs to deal with this? Could I have done better? I could do better now, I thought. Now that it’s too late.

“What do you think of?” Naohiro asked, moving his chair closer to mine.

“Of my sons. And of my regrets about the things I’d like to do over again as a mother.”

“But when you speak of your sons it is always with admiration. Is it true you would like to return and do things that might change how they are?” Naohiro asked, smiling.

I laughed. He was right.

But so was I. There were quite a few knots I wished I could go back and untie. Still, it helped to remember how honest and funny and decent my sons were and how fortunate I was to have had them as traveling companions for so much of my life’s journey.

But I also thought of the next part of my life, and wondered if I would travel it alone.

It was not a question about Naohiro, although I didn’t doubt that the closeness between us had nudged it to the foreground. It was really a question about me. Sometimes I feared I’d grown too comfortable with my independence to relearn the give-and-take that intimacy demands.

I liked being in control of my life; of where I went and what I did, of going to bed late and getting up early, of eating meals that suited me when it suited me. Sometimes when I looked back at the days of being a wife and mother, one of the things that most amazed me was that every day I was the one who made the decision as to what three other people would eat. It tired me out now just to think about the effort it had taken over the years to come up with the thousands of meals that would meet the different requirements of my husband and sons. And while I knew that the care and feeding of children was behind me, my fear was I’d grown too selfish—when I was in a better mood I thought of it as having become “set in my ways”—to sustain a life with even one