“Il temp è un gran medico.” Time is a great healer.

—Italian Proverb

I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there, baking beneath the Tuscan sun, engrossed in Eliana’s tale. At least an hour. When she finished talking, it was lunchtime and there were a few vacant lounges around us, though I didn’t remember seeing anyone leave.

In the telling of her story Eliana had changed to me. Now, somehow, she had become larger than life, reminding me that the best stories aren’t always in books.

“Do you believe that?” I asked. “That love doesn’t give second chances.”

“I did for a while.”

“So what happened next?”

“I went back to Utah to get on with my life. A fresh start. But it was hard. I had changed so much.” She laughed. “Everyone called me Ellen, and I would look around to see who they were talking to. They say you can’t go home again. They’re right. But it’s not home that changes.”

“And Alessio, how did he cope with the move?”

“It was also hard for him at first. I hadn’t realized that his grandmother was a stranger to him, and it took him a while to warm up to her. But you know how adaptable children are. We also discovered that he had fewer allergies in America, so we had less problems with his asthma.”

“You found a job?”

“I started selling my paintings. It was that or leave Alessio with a baby-sitter. I was surprised at how well it went. I never had to go out and find a real job.”

“I’d like to see your work sometime.”

She smiled. “I’m always looking for clients. Do you ever get up to Park City?”

“All the time. My kids ski there.”

“The Linton Gallery on Main Street has some of my landscapes.”

All of my questions had been leading up to this one.

“And Ross?”

“Ross,” she repeated. “I thought about him every day. I thought that leaving Italy would make it easier somehow. But I was wrong.” She smiled. “My broken heart followed me clear across the Atlantic and found me in Vernal, Utah. I have to admit that I was getting pretty tired of hurting. It was like being sick and wondering when you’re going to get better.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. “But life goes on.”

She smiled. “Yeah, it goes on. But never the way you expect it to. It was about six months after I returned to America that everything changed.”

VERNAL, UTAH. JUNE 2000

Doris Webb sat on a vinyl chair on the concrete front porch of her home. Her needles darted and bobbed in ritualistic motion like two cabaret dancers, indifferent to the occasional pangs of her arthritis. She was happy, and this was reflected in the yarn she had chosen for the blanket she knit: bright yellows and greens and oranges.

It was a small home, with painted wood side panels, identical in architecture to the rest on the street. Like the rest, it had been built in the economic boom of postwar America when entire neighborhoods sprang up overnight in the once pastoral ridges of cow pasture.