“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.

Doris had known the home when it was young. She and Ed had bought it new, when they were just newlyweds, their entire lives open before them like a blank diary.

She had lived a life there. It was there that they had raised their one child—their daughter, Ellen. It was that same porch where Ellen had received her first kiss, the night of her junior prom, from Mike Dunlop, a cowboy Ed had never liked. He had flashed the porch light on and off until they quit, while Doris sat in front of the television set watching Johnny Carson, shaking her head and telling him to leave the young people alone.