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sage-colored dress and a fierce look. She could see the road opening out in front of her, and she almost felt that she could see straight through the man next to her on the unembellished, flat seat. The boy she’d grown up with had been completely transformed, wrung out by what the winter had done; for the first time in his life he had been made to understand what it meant to be a man. The change in him was so absolute, she saw, that he expected everything else in the world to have undergone a similar shift of gravity. Including her.
    Maybe there was something scandalous about them after all, she thought. They made each other nervous.
    â€œI’m feeling tired and different these days, Beck,” John said to her that night, when he’d finished telling her about his plans for the farm, and about how certain smells or tunes, certain slants of light,affected him in ways he couldn’t always predict or account for—“peculiar moments,” he called them.
    â€œAre you?” Rebecca’s eyes, a gray that her many would-be beaux swore reminded them of everything from storm clouds to silverware, turned back to the road out ahead of the horse’s ears. She was afraid. Or, even if she wasn’t afraid, she sensed in herself all the physical symptoms of being afraid—the shortness of breath, the lightness of head, the quickened clumsiness of perception, which all, perhaps, amounted to the same thing, regardless. “You don’t seem much changed.”
    â€œI don’t?” John had to laugh. It wasn’t a happy sound.
    â€œAll right, you do.” Rebecca sighed. “I don’t know why I said that.” But she did know why she’d said it—she was determined not to let John Hirschfelder say anything she would have to agree with. She felt she had to stop him from asking her anything, any question at all, that she might say yes to. “I just mean to say that
I
think of you the same way as ever,” she said relentlessly.
    John cleared his throat, but she was too uncomfortable at the thought of causing him pain to look at him. Instead Rebecca blinked down at her gloved hands, holding leather reins, which were, really, among the strangest things on earth, when you thought about them for a minute—that these rough straps had been made by some human hand for this purpose exactly: to connect her to an animal, to let her express her wishes to an animal without their being able to communicate in any other real way.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being untruthful. You’re different. Everybody knows it. I know it, too,” she added quietly. But John had already decided to speak.
    â€œWell, the honest fact is I think I’m frightened, Beck.” Johnwas now the one whose gaze had turned out toward some distant point across the fields. His admission had been sudden, and it aroused an unfamiliar sensation in them both.
Is this what it’s like. Is this what it would be like, us two.
In an instant she saw the two of them at the kitchen table at his house, in the morning, at breakfast. She saw herself passing him something, some little thing. She saw him reach for it, his brown hands. “I don’t know how I’m going to manage.”
    â€œManage what?”
    â€œEverything. There’s too much . . . land. I sometimes think I’m killing myself at it,” he said, and he meant it as a joke, but of course one didn’t say such a thing as a joke, particularly if it were true.
    She was alarmed but tried not to show it. “Oh. I—I know so little about farming,” Rebecca said, lamely. “You know—we’ve always lived in town, my father and me. Everything I know about farms I know from listening to—to you,” she rushed on. “You seem to know everything, you always make it sound so easy. You practically ran the place even before . . . your parents’