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.In fact, his gardener still kept his trowels and shovels under lock and key out of habit from Pietro’s boyhood, when, at any chance, Pietro would sneak into the gardener’s shed to steal the tools and mount another assault on the earth that covered his mother’s grave.“I never told another girl this,” he told her, looking into her eyes with surprise and a certain curious expectation, as if waiting for her to explain to him why he had chosen her.But it was a mystery to Carolina as well.She had never asked for his secrets, and she wasn’t sure she wanted them.They seemed like confessions to her, not the pretty trinkets she had thought a new lover would confide.She felt their weight, and her own inability to heal or absolve, and it frightened her.She found herself wishing for the Pietro her heart had constructed over the previous years: sure-footed, understanding, and fearless, to come rescue her from Pietro himself as he rambled on at her side.The wish made her dizzy.Still, Pietro didn’t seem to tire of their conversations, or of her.At her mother’s invitation, he returned for dinner the night after his first visit, and from then the pattern was set.Each day, he arrived at Carolina’s home on some pretext: bearing a brace of bloodied rabbits he had killed that morning because her father admitted to a fondness for them; carrying a bottle of his father’s best wine, which he hoped might alleviate the headache her mother had complained of the previous day; or insisting, to her father’s delight, that the shade of her garden was simply much more pleasant than the bright sunlight in his, so that he couldn’t help but prefer to spend his time in it.Carolina lived through those first days with Pietro half believing that it was all a dream from which she might awake at any moment, and she moved through her days as if even the slightest sound or movement might cause the whole world to dissolve.It was the end of the week before she remembered that she had not seen her lake for days, a realization that came to her as she watched a hard summer rain beat down on her father’s drive, cutting slender streams through the gravel.It was Sunday.The night before, at the Rosetti gala, Pietro had danced over half the dances with her and spent most of the rest at her side under one of the enormous goose-feather fans Silvia Rosetti had ordered affixed to her ballroom walls, large enough that, in an emergency, they might also serve as wings for a grown man.During one of the more sentimental waltzes, Pietro had nodded at a dancer in a military jacket and repeated a story that he had told her only days before: “When I was a young man,” he murmured, with all the urgency of a new secret, “my only dream was to die in battle.I never thought I would live to be this old.”Carolina had felt the gaze of a pair of girls on the other side of the room.When her eyes met theirs, they quickly turned away.She looked back at Pietro, struggling to compose her face into an expression of surprise and sympathy.“I am so glad you were wrong,” she said, as she had the first time he had told her.With great emotion, he had taken her hand in both of his.No word had come yet from him today.The little storm soon blew itself out.When the slim rivers in the driveway had grown still, reflecting the white sky, Carolina rose and went out.Turri stood at the water’s edge, soaking wet, his thin shirt sticking to his skin in large patches.“You could have gone inside,” Carolina called.Turri glanced back at her and grinned.“Have you been swimming?” she asked when she reached him.He shook his head.“I was studying the rain.”“What did you learn?” she asked.The sun was still hidden by a thin haze that covered the whole visible sky, but even from there it burned bright enough to make the water on his temples shine.“I was sleeping on the bank,” he said.“I woke up when it started to rain.I sat up to go to the house, but then I thought, I wonder what I’ll see if I just lie here and look up?”“What did you see?” she asked.“Rain,” he said, grinning again.“And then it gets in your eyes, and you can’t see anything.”Turri didn’t ask about her absence, and she didn’t mention Pietro to him, although it was impossible that he hadn’t heard the rumors.Instead, they flipped her rowboat upright and pushed out onto the lake together, Carolina at the oars and Turri sprawled in the bow.His damp clothes dried as the sunlight burned off the remaining clouds.Carolina let the oars drift, hypnotized by the thousand ways the forest changed each time the boat swung a breath to the right or a breath to the left.Finally the sun broke free from the clouds completely.As she raised her hand to shield her eyes, she realized she had no sense of how much time had passed.Suddenly wide awake with worry, she rowed the few strokes back to land and then, at Turri’s request, pushed him back out onto the water again.When she returned to the house, a servant told her that Pietro had already arrived, and that her mother had taken him to the greenhouse.Her father had built the glass structure on the back lawn when Carolina was seven, again over the objections of his exasperated gardener, so that her mother could always have the southern blossoms she remembered from her youth.Today, the glass panels were still fogged from the rain.“Carolina!” Pietro exclaimed, as if she were a ship returning from an indefinite journey.“Where have you been?” her mother asked, a note of warning in her voice.Carolina paused in the door of the humid room.On their damp wooden tables, lilies, freesia, and a gang of waxy orchids waited for her answer.“I went to the lake,” she said
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