Lush emerald grass tapered at the edges of a gray gravel stream wide enough for a single automobile to travel. Rosebushes sprang up on either side as the stream ran up an impressive incline, at the top of which was a wide, statuesque home the likes of which could not be readily found in the city. There was a flagpole on top and two flags lapped at the air: one American, the second my blue-and-white Fleurdelisé. Their bodies took turns curling and unfurling so that only one was fully visible at a time. As we approached, the flagpole ran down as though into the hill itself, except that the closer we came, the more the home grew beneath it. My eyes traveled from the iron fencing of the widow’s walk down two stories, admiring gables on either side. Much care had been taken with the precise placement atop the hill, and the architect had more than succeeded with the building’s slow, dramatic reveal.

“I remember the first time you saw it. Such a fond memory.”

I kept my eyes on the manor. Along with his fond memory, it must have been what made him smile.

“It wasn’t this blue-gray color then,” he said, though with the innumerable windows and decorative brackets, the muted color was almost overwhelmed by the white trim. “Your eyes were twice as wide as they are now.”

Lyman parked the car and hurried around to let me out before his hold of my arm caught my attention.

“You do still like it, Dolly?”

“It’s gorgeous.” I praised the house if only to speak over the pet name that surely belonged to his wife. In the moment that followed, all I could feel was his warm hand on the bare skin of my elbow. “What color was it originally?”

He stepped back and turned to face the house as though he, too, were seeing it for the first time.

“Sort of a rose. Or salmon, Dolores once called it. I don’t know the difference.” I was becoming accustomed to the occasional revelation of a dimple in his right cheek, which I now admired, rather than trying to explain how very different one color was from the other. “Whatever it was, it was the color of my childhood home.”

“In New England,” I recalled, and he spun around as though I’d performed some impressive feat. Perhaps I should have disabused him of the notion, reminding him that my father told me something about each new suitor and that if I tried I could probably still remember them all, if not by name than by minutiae. Of course we’d been taught never to speak of the others, back when I was part of Dolores, and certainly once married never to speak as though there had been many.

“In New England, yes. I was born in a house exactly like this one. But I never wanted to go back once I met you.”