She scurried across to the shelter he’d indicated, and though he kept his back turned he must have been listening for her, since he turned around as soon as she returned.

“We might as well go to sleep now. The sun is almost gone, and I’d rather not light the lantern. Best to let our eyes grow used to the dark.”

She took off her boots and stretched out on the makeshift bed he’d made. Niccolò lay down about a meter away, once again wrapped in a single blanket.

The sun sank into the western sky, the moon began to rise, and the countryside fell silent. She felt perfectly safe with Niccolò so close by, but sleep did not come, no matter how earnestly she tried to empty her mind and banish her fears.

“Are you awake?” she whispered at last.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Watching the stars.”

Nina rolled onto her back and looked up, and her breath caught in her throat. The dome of the sky was ablaze with stars, far more than there were people on earth, and set against the sweep of the heavens she could see, all too clearly, that she and her worries were only the merest specks of stardust.

“There’s so much I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’m not even sure what I’m meant to say to people when they ask how we met.”

“Why don’t we figure that out now? If you aren’t too tired.”

“You don’t have a story ready?”

“Not really. I do have some ideas. We could say we met at the hospital—remember that you were a student nurse. I’d come in with a complaint of some sort. A broken wrist, or a cut that needed stitching, and you helped to care for me.” He paused, and then he sighed, a low, grumbling sort of noise that might have been drawn from Bello’s lexicon.

“What is it?”

“If we tell her that, my sister will worry about me even more than she usually does.”

She decided to ignore the question of why his sister was given to worrying about him. “What if we tell them a romantic story? That’s how people meet in books, and in films, too. They bump into one another, or the heroine drops something, and the hero rescues it for her. People will forget about the other parts if they have that one story to remember.”

“Very well. How did the hero and heroine meet in our story?”

She closed her eyes, shutting out the wondrous starlight, and made herself imagine a different life, a different her, in which she was the heroine and life was a series of charming romantic vignettes, and the hero was a man who looked and behaved exactly like Niccolò. She’d never been terribly interested in romantic stories, but this one might end up holding her interest.