She had gone to sleep on a thought the night before. As she walked the labyrinth of her aching heart, she realized that love and gratitude are born twins. For if she were asked what she felt for Ross, she’d say love. But what she felt most was gratitude. Gratitude for what he had brought into her life. Gratitude for the way he had loved her. Gratitude that he had made her feel whole again. In spite of what she had said to her mother, gratitude even for the pain.

Maybe she too would marry someday. As foreign as the idea seemed to her, her intuition told her that she wouldn’t be alone forever. Alessio needed a father. She would make a partnership with a man and they would be friends and she might even learn to love him. Still, a part of her feared that deep inside she would always feel that she was only settling.

She ejected the CD and put in an old Eagles album. The Italian stuff made her think too much.

Three hours later Eliana arrived in Park City: the mining town turned exclusive ski resort. There was a time when land there could be bought for fifty dollars an acre. Now the old mine shacks on Main Street were being snatched up by the rich and famous for a million dollars and change. Even in the summer months, when the hills were dry and the runs bare, the town was busy with tourists.

She parked her car in the lot at the Linton Gallery then walked down the road two blocks, where she met up with her new art dealer, Marsha Ellington, at a sidewalk café.

A warm mountain flurry descended the Wasatch slopes and ruffled the fringes of the café’s awning. Eliana sat sipping iced tea across from Marsha, who was meticulously spearing the olives from her pasta salad with a fork, then piling them next to a partially eaten hard roll on her bread plate.

“You heard me. I told them, no olives. How hard is that? If he hadn’t taken so long to bring it out in the first place, I’d make them do it over.”

“Olives are good for you,” Eliana said.

“Yeah, well so is Jazzercise, but you don’t see me prancing around in spandex.” She speared another olive and dropped it on the plate. “There are a lot of olive trees in Italy, aren’t there?”

It was like asking if there were a lot of Italians in Rome. “Yes. We had them at the villa.”

“Are there two kinds of trees, black olives and green olives?”

“No. They come from the same tree. All olives are green at first. It’s just a matter of how ripe they are when they’re picked.”