It rained. All the next day and into the evening, the kind of rain that is greeted by New England farmers with joy and then with fear and finally with anger as the seedlings wash away. That night he lay and listened to the rain and in a yellow silk nightgown she drifted like a bright shadow into the dark room.

“What’s the matter? Are you angry with me?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Rafe, I have to change or perish,” she said.

“When did you decide that?” he asked, not unkindly.

“I don’t blame you for hating me.”

“I don’t hate you, Liz.”

“If only we could turn the clock back and avoid making our mistakes.”

“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

Outside the rain began to drum with increasing intensity. “My hair is almost all grown back. My own hair.”

“It’s fine and soft,” he said, stroking.

“You’ve been so kind to me. I’m sorry for everything, Rafe.”

“Shshsh.” He turned and took her into his arms.

“Remember that first rainy night?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I want to pretend,” she said. “Will you let me pretend?”

“What.”

“That you’re a boy again and I’m a young girl and we both have never.”

“Oh, Liz.”

“Please, please, make believe neither one of us knows a thing.”

So they played like children and he knew again the palest imitation of the discovery and the fear. “Amoroso,” she called him finally. “Delicioso, mágico, marido,” the words of love he had taught her in the first weeks of marriage.

Afterwards he laughed and she turned away and wept bitterly. He got up and opened the french doors and went out onto the little balcony in the rain and broke a blossom from its stem in a flower pot, a calendula, and came back and put the flower on her navel.

“It’s cold and wet,” she complained, but she allowed it and stopped crying.

“You do forgive me? You’ll let me try to make a new start?” she asked.

“I love you,” he said.

“But do you forgive me.”

“Go to sleep.”

“Say yes.”

“Yes,” he said happily. He would call Kittredge, he thought drowsily, and tell him his services no longer were needed.

He fell asleep holding her hand, and when he awoke it was morning. During the night she had rolled over and the flower was crushed, there was a mess of orange petals on the sheets. She was sleeping heavily, her limbs sprawled, her hair black and tumbled, her face without trouble, washed in the blood of the lamb.

He got ready without waking her and left the apartment and went to the hospital, a new man for a new day.