“Gardens,” she said. “Down there. Formal. Woodlands around the edges. Can we go back inside now?”

“Have you seen the summerhouse?”

“When I toured the place. Not since.”

“I visited it this afternoon. It’s charming.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Let’s go visit it.”

“You know, when I first met you, I was convinced you were mad,” Alva said, her teeth starting to chatter. Sam pressed her a little closer. “There was the whole ghost thing, and the bit with the shoelaces—”

“Ah yes! I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve revised my calculations, but I’m going to have to create a test group—”

“Then, for a while, I thought I misjudged you. Perhaps you were brilliant and the things I thought were crazy were simply all the bits I didn’t understand—”

“Oh, I’m quite sure most of them were just mad,” Sam said complacently.

“But now, now I’m absolutely, completely, sure of it, because only a madman would haul me out into below-freezing temperatures to go look at some patches of mud that may, at some point in the future, be gardens, and insist upon continuing to a house specifically designated as being appropriate only in the summertime. Without even wearing his coat.”

“You know what they say about madmen,” he said, mounting the rickety, frosty steps of the summerhouse.

“I can’t even begin to imagine.”

“You should humor them.” He smiled at her and opened the door. “After you.”

“All right, we’re inside,” she said. “Can we leave now?”

“You’re very impatient,” Sam said, pulling a chair away from the wall and crouching down. “I want to show you something.”

“And this something just couldn’t wait until warmer weather, I suppose,” she grumbled, but she moved nearer nonetheless.

“Here.” Sam pointed to a place on the wall, gesturing her even closer. He’d found the carving in his initial tour of the property and been charmed by it. EdB + MS, the worn markings declared. Forever and a day.

Alva’s fingers traced the shallow cuts. “When do you think it’s from?”

“If the dB is de Boer, then it must be sometime between 1789 and 1840.”

“A long time ago,” she said, her fingers still on the carving. “They would have been young.”

“Why young?”

“To believe so passionately in love’s permanence that you’d carve it into a building? Only youth possesses such blind naïveté.”

Sam considered her. “Here,” he said, pulling a dusty, moth-eaten blanket down from a high shelf and draping it around her shoulders. “Do you know how my parents met?”

“Your mother was his secretary or something, wasn’t she? I remember reading a feature on them in a newspaper.”