By the time they reached the restaurant, somewhere several towns away, Carter’s interest in eating dinner was much diminished. It was not so much the speed at which Elena drove that had unsettled him—he had a heavy foot himself—but her impatience, and the way she swerved the car in and out of traffic on the narrow, poorly lit two-lane roads was unnerving, to say the least. She always blasted the horn the moment she drove up behind a slower-moving car. Worse, she had a habit of pulling out to pass without looking ahead to see if another car might be coming in the opposite direction. Carter had been certain on more than one occasion that they were about to die in a head-on collision. Inevitably, Elena had swerved the car back to her side of the road, but often at the last instant, avoiding catastrophe only by split seconds. All in all, it was not a ride to stimulate one’s appetite.

Despite his slightly frazzled nerves, Carter soon regained his breath and was once again in high spirits when at last he was out of the car and strolling into the restaurant with Elena on his arm. Just looking at her, how could he have been anything other than joyous? Before long they had settled in at a little table off by themselves. They placed their orders, the wine was brought out, and finally Carter had a quiet moment with her to confess why he had learned Italian and traveled all the way to Abruzzo in search of her. He longed now to tell her how he had dreamed of her every long summer night since that day in the spring when he first saw her. He wanted to tell her of the connection he felt to her that very moment they met, something that went far beyond anything he had ever known. He needed more than anything else to hear her tell him that she had felt it, too, and that somehow he had occupied a place in her thoughts, as well.

All this Carter had rehearsed untold times over the summer and was prepared to tell her now, when maddeningly, just at the moment of truth, Elena’s cell phone rang.

“Managgia, this thing,” fumed Elena, opening her purse. Upon seeing the number of the caller, she frowned, and followed that remark with an English-language obscenity of the sort that would win a movie an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.