Novo picked up a cup and the pattern on it glowed, almost fluorescent. His touch changed the chemical composition of everything, trailing technicolor, the space around him so much bolder and more vivid than anywhere else. He blinked slowly. All over the garden people stretched like cats and curled back into themselves, suddenly blissful, practically purring. It was as if he’d dropped a euphoric in the tap water. Faces soft as warm butter, the hard locks suddenly gone from jaws, scowls smoothed out like they were pillowcases and Novo was the iron. The woman opposite-but-one, so tightly wound, went all out of character, loose-limbed and agile, and swept like a dancer across the lawn. The knotty old couple glowed and stippled like sunlight in a forest. This little boy was screaming in his stroller and when Novo smiled at him the screaming stopped, just like that, and the boy went straight to sleep, thumb-in-mouth blissful. I wondered if anybody noticed it on me—my right smile back, my long spine, this warm-bath feel, the way everything was precisely and fluidly and perfectly itself, because of him.

He turned in a circle, and everyone in the garden turned too, exactly the same but just a beat behind him, like an echo. I saw it.

“Shall we have some fun?” he said.

“Always.”

He laughed. “Can you dance?”

“Maybe.”

“I bet you’re good,” he said.

“You reckon?”

“Sure. But are you as good as us?”

He was smiling, lifting his arms over his head, tilting his chin while all around, the assembled company copied him and lifted theirs. He turned again, a slower circle, arms out, palms flat, graceful as a dervish, and every single person on that lawn did the same. It was a natural, peaceful thing to watch, like a cornfield bowing in a breeze, or the stop-frame blooming of a rose. If Novo was the stone hitting the water, the people all around us were the ripple.

“Let’s see,” he said, and he stepped close to me and slipped his arm round my waist, and for a second, all of my thoughts were focused right there, only there, where he was touching me. All over the garden, people reached for one another the way we did, and stood joined and waiting.

“Ready?” Novo said, and his cheek was as close as it could be to mine without actually touching, and I felt the soft warmth of his skin near mine, and he took my hand.