At midmorning, I looked from the back window of the kitchen and saw Amy. She was walking alone on the mountain behind the Inn, climbing toward a birch tree where I would often go at night to be alone. I had found the birch on advice from Avrum not long after meeting him. He had said, “Look up to the hill and find you a place, and go to it. Make it yours. Get a tree. A tree is best.” I had selected the birch because I could look down on the village and up to the stars. For some reason, it was not so lonely to be there, at the birch, between the village and the stars.

I told Carter, “I need to get away for a few minutes. Can you cover for me?”

“Sure,” Carter said. He glanced around the kitchen. Nora Dowling was not there. “I saw her, too,” he added. “I don’t blame you.”

Amy was at the birch, under the canopy of its limbs. I knew she had seen me approaching, but she looked away, as though something in the valley, something far off, had captivated her.

I said, “Hi.”

She turned to me. Her face was calm, controlled. “Hello.”

“You missed breakfast,” I said.

“I wasn’t hungry.”

I waited for her to say something else, but she did not.

“I like this tree,” I told her. “Sometimes at night I come up here and look at the stars.”

“I know,” she said.

I was surprised. “You do? How?”

“I’ve watched you.”

“You have?”

She said nothing. She sat on the soft grass beside the tree.

“Mind if I sit with you a couple of minutes?” I asked.

“It’s your tree,” she said.

I sat near her, but not near enough to touch. “It’s pretty up here,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Are you—well, mad at me, or something?” I asked.

“No. Why should I be?”

“I don’t know. You act like it. I thought you were mad last night, in Arch’s.”

She moved her head and the wind caught the thick curl of her black-gold hair and made it flutter across her shoulder.

“How was your date?” she said after a moment.

“Date?” I said. “That wasn’t a date. We were with Mr. Burger’s nieces. You know that. He wanted us to take them to a movie.”

“I call that a date,” she said firmly.

“Well, I don’t,” I countered. “I’d consider it a job. He paid us.”

“He did what?”

“He paid us.”

“Do you know what that makes you?”

“No. What?”

“A gigolo,” she said.

“I don’t know what that is,” I confessed. “Is it a German word?”

“No, it’s not. It’s English. A gigolo is someone who gets paid to—to escort women,” she explained.

“Then I guess I am one,” I conceded.