He was doing it again, breaking down things, tossing them out as if they’d never had any value to anyone, and making what had seemed wrong look different and right.

And would you choose it now?

She didn’t dare look at him. No point in asking, she said and started to shiver.

You are cold, he said. Take my coat.

No, she said. But he had already removed it and placed it around her shoulders It was warm from him. She thought of the sweater he’d left behind, and how they’d never mentioned it. No, she said again, uselessly.

Walter Vail looked out over the treetops. So once you’ve chosen something you can never change? You can never get out of it? He seemed to be thinking of himself more than of her.

I thought so once. She squared her shoulders. I was wrong.

Always so reasonable, he said.

She shot him a furious look. Always so reasonable. For once she did not want to be the reasonable one. She tapped into something different inside. She wanted to learn new things. She was tired of being the one who held things together.

It was some moments later that she extracted herself from his arms.

This was intoxication. Alone later, thinking of him, her body swooned.

She remembered what she’d known before and knew it was here again and as she remembered more a wind seemed to blow through her, and she remembered how bursting one could feel, how filled with life and a sense of the glorious in things, and remembering more she saw without feeling it a cruel side: how rapture had no lasting place in the world, if any place at all, but she ignored that. She had used up great reserves on his account, beating it back, and now with his return her feeling was knocking her over. She did not have the least idea what to do.

Would she go through the same thing again? No, if she did, it would be different. It had to be. A thing cannot be the same each time.

She paused a moment in the greenhouse at home, holding her gloved fingers in a thoughtful pose. She could have sat this way for hours. She was not getting much done.

She understood him better now and herself as well, she would be able to manage this time. How, she was hard-pressed to say, but she felt it. The conviction, never exactly voiced, and therefore never subject to scrutiny, took her back to a familiar old place, full of hope, where she was astonished by him.