BY THE TIME the talk was over, the sky had darkened and a wind had risen; in the dining hall, Rosalind could hardly hear Dee for the clatter of silverware and the clamor of voices, the rattle of windows in the wind, the harsh croaks of the crows settling hurriedly into their roosts. While they ate rice and fish and greens, the thunderstorm sent thick sheets of water down the walls and windows, rain so violent that the sky turned black and they had to turn on the lights, yet so brief that by the time they were drinking coffee, the late-evening sun was once more beaming through the windows and making the roof-drips glitter. Rosalind went out onto the porch with Dee, inhaling the sharp air as she once would have inhaled the smoke from a cigarette. A heavyset man from Israel with white wisps of ear hair came up and peeled Dee away, leaving Rosalind alone to watch the flitting damselflies. Surely those black-winged ones, with their iridescent emerald bodies, had not been here in previous years?

“Ebony jewelwings,” said Sebastian, materializing beside her. “Those are always fun. My brother used to study dragonflies and damselflies. You know” (she did not know), “the odonatids. But”—he grasped her shoulders lightly and spun her, as if they were waltzing, toward the right—“look over here. Isn’t that odd?”

He pointed toward the tall pines off to the side of the porch, where Sissa’s daughter and her clarinet had earlier detached herself from the tree. White foam was streaming down the craggy bark of the trunks, splitting and re-forming around the stubs and then gathering into frothy petticoats at the roots.

“What is that?” Rosalind said. “Are they sick?” The foam seemed to be jetting from the cracks.

“They’re fine,” Sebastian said. “It’s just chemistry—it’s been so hot and so dry, for so long, that the trunks got coated with all sorts of salt and acid particles from the air. When the water hits those, it makes a kind of soap. Then it foams as it runs over the bark.”

How had she not learned that before? Later that week, when they were deep in a fling Rosalind believed she’d concealed from everyone but Dee (and even Dee didn’t know about Sebastian’s lost brother), the number of coincidences required to bring about that moment made them laugh. Why, on the night of their first meeting, should there have been a heavy rain at just that place and time, falling after such hot, dry weather, producing the phenomenon Rosalind hadn’t noticed before but which Sebastian (initially trained as a plant physiologist; now screening fungi used by folk healers and determining the structures of the active antimicrobial compounds) was exactly the right person to explain? And why did he get to explain it to someone who’d care?