Alex wondered a little what that “real world” might consist of now, but answered Lucy with a deliberate lightness: “Like the rest of us then. We’ll need a flight around four. I’ve got to return the car first, and pay the excess. We should have an early lunch.”

“I wish we never had to leave here.” Lucy easily sensed Alex’s train of unspoken thought. “It feels safe: as though it’s got its arms around me. And the linen smells of lavender…”

She had been deeply affected by coming to this, Alex’s mother’s house, and felt she’d found something she never realized was lost to her. Despite the tensions they had been through, the place itself worked like a love philter on them, and made her feel relaxed, and whole, and healed, in Alex’s presence. She dropped her towel and walked to the window, forgetting the compulsion to cover her scarred body for the first time in months. With the victory of sunshine over the rain there was a double rainbow.

“Look, Alex.”

He joined her, putting his arms around her from behind and leaning into the windowsill. “Poetry, and science.” His eyes smiled at her. “You must see the garden before lunch.”

“Let me cook for you today,” she offered; and Alex didn’t protest.

The grass was soaked, and a few small branches littered the orchard, but there was little damage from the storm. Lucy looked at a hundred rosebushes coming into bud, tiny shoots alive everywhere, but no proper blooms yet. She fingered the spiral in the fountain which was set at the heart of the beds, and Alex explained it was his mother’s handiwork. The water was overflowing, freezing; but she scooped some out and looked at the depiction of Venus in the center. On a stone wall forming a windbreak behind the flowers Lucy noticed a sundial—an ancient arm of iron pointing its finger back at Venus. There was enough sunshine to check its accuracy; and she looked at her watch like a little girl proving a mystery. She screwed up her nose when it wasn’t right, and Alex laughed.

“It’s been calibrated as a moon dial. My mother was called Diana, like the goddess of the moon; and she loved moonlight. For a while she used the sundial in the other part of the garden, and we used to have to make adjustments—I recall forty-eight minutes of correction for every day either side of the full moon, when midday was accurate to midnight. But thereafter you had to do a lot of math. So this has the corrections set into the brass.”

“How magical. What a wonderful mother you had.”