Her earlier indisposition seemed to be gone. There was more rain threatening, but she didn’t care. She would welcome the bracing cold of it. Her hunger was still with her, but it only added intensity to the glorious way she was beginning to feel. She found herself walking east past empty shops and dark apartment houses, and with a more rapid step into the quiet stretch between York and East End avenues. Here the buildings are older, the lights dimmer. Across East End lay the darkness of Carl Shurz Park. With its few old streetlamps lighting the paths, and the mist that hung beneath the tall trees, the park reminded her of a scene from childhood, from her teenage years in Savannah. She had a vivid memory of Bobby Dewart, the sour smell of his skin and the lovely, adolescent hours they had spent touching one another among the headstones in the old Savannah City Graveyard. They had walked along the docks afterward, smelling the salt breeze that came up the Savannah River at night, watching the last tourists leave the Pirate House Restaurant, and declaring the eternity of their love.

Being fourteen, she had known nothing of the ways of time. Soon her father had been transferred by International Paper, next stop Des Moines. And Bobby Dewart? She had no idea.

At this moment, as she crossed East End, drawn by the sensuality of the night park, she remembered that love in all its timid eagerness. It had been young and doomed—and yet hadn’t it also in a sense been eternal?

There came into her heart a painful longing for all her lost secret places: night and empty benches and abandoned paths. She went slowly down the tarmac sidewalk, recalling with this same delectable pain her great loves, Bobby and the others, and yes, Tom too. He ranked as a great love, she could not deny it. She went through the park until she came to the esplanade that stretches beyond it. Bordered on one side by buildings and on the other by the East River. The current, always swift, hissed in the darkness below. Far out in the river a small boat was defined by its bobbing lights. Along the esplanade the benches gleamed, still wet with rain. Immediately behind the benches rose the apartment buildings. The terraces of the lower floors jutted out perhaps ten feet above the walk. In their darkness these buildings acquired something that they did not possess during daylight hours. Sarah could not define it exactly. Certainly it wasn’t menace. More a sense of mystery.

Their blank windows were . . . interesting. It didn’t seem impossible, the way she had begun to feel, that she could climb to one of those terraces.

Then what would she do?

She could taste a peach breaking in her mouth, its juicy sweetness filling her with delight.