Amy and I stayed only a few minutes after the toast to Avrum. All of us embraced as friends embrace and we thanked Carter for the dinner and the memories. Amy paused again at each of my paintings hanging in Carter’s den. When she had first seen them—led to them by Carter—she had touched my arm and whispered, “They’re beautiful, but I knew they would be.” And she said again, as she wandered from painting to painting, “They’re beautiful.”

We drove back to Amy’s summer home. She had given me a tour earlier. It was a small, cedar-board house with interior walls of paneling, giving it a feeling of warmth. It had a den with a large stone fireplace and one wall of bookshelves, but with no books in them. And, surprisingly, there were no paintings or prints hanging in any of the rooms. “It looks empty, I know,” she had explained, “but I’m packing everything that belonged to my mother and moving it. I’ll replace it with my own things.”

There was no awkwardness at the door when we returned. Amy went inside and I followed. She asked me to light a fire while she made coffee, and she went into the kitchen. I was sitting on the floor, watching the fire build into flames, when she came back into the den.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” she said. “Of everything in the house, I like the fireplace the best. The one we have in the city looks as though it would hate a fire.”

She put the coffee on the stonework before the fireplace and took cushions from the sofa and sat beside me, pulling her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. The aroma from the coffee and the faint air of woodsmoke filled the room.

Amy watched the flames curling around the wood. Fingers of fire danced in the reflection of her eyes. She said after a moment, “I remember sitting in the Inn that night after the dance at Arch’s, and there was a fire like this. My parents were waiting up for me, playing cards with another couple—the Traubs, I think—and I sat there, on the floor near them, wanting you to be with me.” She looked at me. “You remember that night, don’t you?”

“Yes, I remember it.”

She inhaled slowly, as though inhaling the memory and the warmth of the fire, and then she said quietly, “I believe that was the night, and that was the place—there, in front of the fire—when I first knew that I really loved you. When I felt it, I mean. When it was more than just something I said because I was glad to be with you.”

“Is that when you talked to your mother about me?” I asked.