“Yes, I know.” Hooking an arm around one upraised knee, she studied him. Poetry one moment, beer commercials the next. “Every now and again, Hornblower, I wonder if you’re for real.”

“Oh, I’m real.” He stretched out to watch the sky. The grass was cool and soft beneath him, and the wind played lazily through the trees. “What do you see? Up there?”

She tilted her head back. “The sky. A blue one, thank goodness, with a few clouds that should clear by evening.”

“Don’t you ever wonder what’s beyond it?”

“Beyond what?”

“The blue.” With his eyes half-closed, he imagined . . . the endless sweep of stars, the pure black of space, the beautiful symmetry of orbiting moons and planets. “Don’t you ever think about the worlds up there, just out of reach?”

“No.” She saw only the arc of blue, speared through by mountains. “I suppose it’s because I think more about worlds that were. My work usually keeps my feet, and my eyes, on the ground.”

“If there’s going to be a world tomorrow, you have to look to the stars.” He caught himself. It seemed foolish to pine for something that might be lost. How odd it was that he was thinking so much of the future, and Libby so much of the past, when they had the here and now.

“What movies and music?” he asked abruptly. Libby shook her head. There seemed to be no order to his thought patterns. “Before, you said you liked movies and music for fun. Which ones?”

“All sorts. Good or bad. I’m easily entertained.”

“Tell me your favorite movie.”

“That’s difficult.” But his eyes were so intense, so earnest, that she picked one at random from her list of favorites. “Casablanca.”

He liked the sound of it, the way she said it. “What’s it about?”

“Come on, Hornblower, everyone knows what it’s about.”

“I missed it.” He gave her a quick, guileless-smile that no woman should have trusted. “I must have been busy when it came out.”

She laughed again, with a quick shake of her head, a brightening of her eyes. “Sure. Both of us must have had pretty full schedules in the forties.”

He let that pass. “What was the story?” He didn’t care about the plot. He only wanted to hear her talk, to watch her as she did.

To humor him, and because it was easy to sit by the water and daydream, she began. He listened, enjoying the way she told the tale of lost love, heroism and sacrifice. Even more, he enjoyed the way she gestured with her hands, the way her voice ebbed and flowed with her feelings. And the way her eyes mirrored them, darkening, softening, when she spoke of lovers reunited, then pulled apart, by destiny.

“No happy ending,” Cal murmured.

“No, but I always felt that Rick found her again, years later, after the war.”

“Why?”

She had settled back, pillowing her head on her folded arms. “Because they belonged together. When people do, they find each other, no matter what.” She was smiling when she turned her head, but the smile faded slowly when she saw the way he was looking at her. As if they were alone, she thought. Not just alone in the mountains, but totally, completely alone, as Adam and Eve had been.