She remembered, back when she was in college, a painting instructor had once confessed to her that he got a tremendous rush in working with live models. He felt as if, in painting them, he owned a portion of them, in the way some aboriginal tribes believe a photograph captures a soul. Maybe that’s what she felt now, that in painting him she might in some way own him, in a way her conscious mind would not allow.

Artists and authors often fall in love with their subjects, though the attraction she felt had started even before she touched brush to canvas. It started that first night they met.

Ross Story was a different kind of man from Maurizio, and she didn’t know if it was the influence of culture or personality, or perhaps the sum of both. The truth was that she didn’t know men that well. She had no brother, and her father, though loving, had always been a little distant. She hadn’t dated all that much. She had had a few boyfriends in high school. Cowboys. In a small town and a small school, with a graduating class of thirty-six, the pickings were meager and one tended to be branded as so-and-so’s girl, and the brand inevitably stuck longer than the relationship. She often laughed when she thought of the modern mystique of the cowboy—usually proffered in bodice-ripper romance novels—talk of free range and wild horses, soft-spoken Marlboro men with hard bodies and steely eyes. Marry one, she thought. She wanted more from her life than getting up at four to milk the cows and feed the chickens.

College was a different world. Going from Vernal to the University of Utah was like dropping from a fish-bowl into a lake. But it was a blur, and just as she began to warm to the change, her father died. His absence left an empty space in her life which, consciously or not, she almost immediately felt the need to fill.

She wished that she had taken courtship more seriously. Or at least been more intelligent about it. Did anyone really spend enough time deciding whom to marry? It seemed to Eliana that most people just chose someone who looked good to them at the time, without really checking the label for its contents. The relational equivalent of fast food. The Italians said it best: romance and wisdom aren’t often seen in the same company.

She had spent years deciding which college to attend, weighing the costs and benefits, and not a hundredth of that time or energy deciding something of infinitely more importance—whom she should spend the rest of her life with. And that was her intent. In the Webb home in Vernal, Utah, marriage was for keeps.

She hadn’t known that there were men like Ross Story. Men who valued what she thought. Men who were emotionally available. Men who didn’t have just one thing on their mind—two if you counted sports. Not that she disparaged sexual attraction. She didn’t. It was pleasurable and delicious in its own way—just not at the exclusion of everything else.