Though he couldn’t see her face, he knew she was looking at him. It was as if a cloud masked her. He didn’t know how long she had stood there before he asked her who she was. Only then did he see her eyes—dark and fearful and sad. Then she stepped back into the shadows and vanished.

As he lay back in bed he thought about Eliana’s painting. There was a reason for every painting.

Ross woke four hours later. There were no tours for him, so he went on a run, then showered and dressed, and drove off to the ancient city of San Gimignano, riding his scooter through the winding back roads of Chianti, past Greve, west at Castellina in Chianti, to Poggibonsi and into San Gimignano—the ancient city some guidebooks called the “medieval Manhattan,” due to its abundance of bell towers. Though only thirteen of them remained, still a fair number for any town, at one time there were more than seventy bell towers in the city.

Ross quickly fell in love with the town. It was smaller than Siena, less commercial, quieter. Do tourists know that a city changes to meet them, Ross wondered, to fulfill their expectations? The very act of tourism seemed to defeat itself. As he wandered through the cobblestone streets, he stopped where a crowd of tourists stood in line, awaiting access to an exhibition. He stopped to see where they were going. Il Museo degli Strumenti di Tortura (The Museum of Torture Devices): a collection of instruments of torture, mostly remnants from the Inquisition, when men and women were tortured in the name of God. Ross turned away. After the last three years of his life he didn’t need reminders of man’s inhumanity to man. He certainly wasn’t going to pay to see it on display.

He ate lunch at a sidewalk pizzeria, where he had a pleasant conversation with an elderly Italian woman from the town who wanted to know why he spoke such good Italian for an American, then invited him over to meet the family, which he carefully declined as he had an appointment back at home.

On his way from town he passed a hotel. He stopped and stared at it: Albergo dei Gigli (Hotel of the Lilies). He must have passed it on the way in, but hadn’t noticed it then. Why did it seem so familiar to him? The longer he looked at it the more convinced he became that he had seen it before.

He walked up to its glass doorway and stepped inside. The lobby was small, marble floored. A red-and-gold rug led to a dark walnut registration counter, the wall behind it emboldened with a bright brass lily—the symbol of Florence.

Suddenly it occurred to him why it was familiar. This was one of the hotels he had seen in a travel guide four years ago. It was one of the hotels that she had chosen for their honeymoon.

The man behind the counter spoke. “May I help you, sir?”