She closed the closet door and stepped over to the window, which looked out onto the terrace and beyond. In the distance, across the familiar sea of red tile roofs, a woman was shaking a mop out on a terrace of her own; Costanza was convinced she could see grains of dust falling like snowflakes through the air. Closer up, on the leaves of the wisteria, she saw the delicately branching veins; she wouldn’t have been surprised if a bud opened into a full purple flower before her eyes.

She turned away from the view and picked up her phone. She and Henry had exchanged numbers the night before. She brought up his and sent him a text asking if he was free to drink prosecco again that evening. On the terrace, at sunset.

Three Months Later

Fall in New York. This was Henry Weissman’s favorite pairing of time and place. His season, in his city, when the sky, scrubbed of its summer haze, seemed to mint an altogether new shade of blue. There was a clarified quality to the autumn light in New York that Henry could perceive even from bed, even as the sun was just making its way over the horizon. He thought of a story by Chekhov he’d once read in which a character’s state of mind was likened to a house where all the old, broken, and dirty windows had their panes replaced with new glass. Henry had felt something similar several times in the past, but this fall the glass seemed cleaner and more transparent than it had in years.

All this drew Henry out of bed with more gusto than he had felt in weeks, but deep within himself he knew that the real reason his day felt hopeful was that he was having dinner with Costanza that night. He was seeing her for the first time since Florence, for the first time since they’d made love in her room at the Pensione Ricci.