She got up from the table and went quietly through the house to the front door. Opened it, stepped onto the porch and stood, letting her gaze wander over the strange landscape of another person’s home.

She was less than two miles from her own house, yet she had the sensation of being in another country, far away from the Valley of Light. Someplace she had read about in one of her books. Ireland, maybe. Or the Swiss Alps. Or the Italian countryside. Or Egypt. Someplace old and beautiful. Someplace ghosted by history soaked into the soil—soil mixed with blood and relics of battles so ancient they had been siphoned up by trees and plants and could be tasted in figs and grapes and pomegranates and olives and other fruits.

One day, she wanted to see such places, to eat the fruits of history off the trees that carried them. She wanted to sit late at night—as it now was—and listen to the slumbering of time.

She had asked Boyd to tell her about the places he had seen in war, but he had refused to talk about them, saying there was nothing pretty about any of them, saying he had seen nothing but rubble and beat-down people and never again wanted to be reminded of it. If she wanted to go to Europe to look at castles and fig orchards and grape vines and olive trees, she would have to make the trip by herself, he had told her.

She remembered the look on his face. A scowl. Meanness.

“That’s what you want, you go do it,” he had said.

I will, she thought, watching the moon hover over the nearby mountains. She was free of Boyd, and she knew it. One day, she would go to the places that had beckoned to her from books—Paris, London, Rome, Dublin, Vienna, Edinburgh. She would go and she would hold the air of each stop in her lungs until it turned to heat in her body.

She stepped to the edge of the porch and gazed at the road in front of the house. Something seemed out of place, but it was only a guess, since it was not her home, or her land. She paused, moved back a step, looked again. At the turnoff leading to the house, parked under a tree, she saw the shadowed silhouette of a truck, and she did not remember it being there earlier.

She moved from the porch to the yard, walked hesitantly toward the truck, wondering if it had been left by one of the men who had caught a ride home with a neighbor. She did not see anyone.

And then she heard a sharp bark from near the truck and she stopped and stepped back. A man’s figure rose up from the truck body, and she heard a voice say, “Quiet down, girl.”

It was Whitlow Mayfield.

The dog barked again and Whitlow pulled himself up in the truck body. “You see something, girl?” he asked anxiously, hopefully.