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must be no whisper against your name until you are married.”
    Carolina stared at her like a fascinated animal. “After you are married,” her mother continued, “many things may happen. You will not speak of them. Neither will your husband, if he is a gentleman.” She looked out the dark window. “Do you understand?”
    Carolina nodded.
    Her mother nodded as well, not at Carolina, but as if agreeing with words spoken by some other, inaudible voice. She leaned back into the divan.
    “Will you ask Stefi to bring me some warm milk when you go?” she asked.
    “Of course,” Carolina said, rising.
    She paused in the door, but her mother had already thrown her arm over her eyes, as if protecting them from some unbearable light in the sky.

    Carolina rose the next morning while it was still dark and slipped down the stairs more by the touch of the railing than by sight. She had slept only in fits, and when she was tired her eyes acted like prisms, warping some things, duplicating others. Now they found the starlight on the dew so dazzling that the whole yard blurred. In the forest, the trees doubled and bent. She blinked, and they were straight again. She could still see some stars beyond the unreliable silhouettes of the topmost branches, but when she tried to focus on them, they flared into full suns or winked out altogether. Despite all this, she reached her house, sank down into the rumpled velvets on her couch, and gave herself up gratefully to a second sleep.
    When she woke, afternoon sun streamed through the scarves in the windows, leaving the faintest traces of their design where the light landed. The ghost of a peacock bloomed in the dark folds of a blanket. A lily dissolved on her desk. Carolina pushed the covers away and lifted the corner of the simple blue scarf in the front window. Turri lay on his back on the bank, his eyes closed, his hands comforting each other on his chest. He looked just as familiar to her as the trees that shaded the opposite banks, and her heart greeted him with the same welcome. The world around him was clear again, each tree where it belonged, each reed as she remembered. Every bit of glowing cottonwood that floated over the black mirror of the lake was crisp and perfect.
    She let the scarf fall back into place and went out to meet him.

    For days afterward, Carolina imagined her father’s footsteps on the grass, thought she heard him breaking twigs in the woods, or confused the bright flashes of bird wings glimpsed through the trees for a scrap of silk at his neck. But as the days turned to weeks, the weeks completed a season, and the leaves of late summer dropped so that she could see clearly through the trees, she realized that he wasn’t coming to surprise her again. In fact, even the innocent visits he had been used to making on his haphazard rambles had stopped. It was a pattern she remembered, finally, from her childhood. Her father hated to punish her, so when he caught her in the act of some mischief, he went to great lengths not to catch her again. If he discovered her happily dunking sections of a mutilated lemon directly into the sugar jar, he issued a strict reprimand, but then he avoided the kitchen as if it had ceased to exist, sometimes for weeks on end. The fact that her misbehavior caused her father such obvious distress had always pained Carolina and made her want to do better. But now, when she felt he had misunderstood her so deeply, his absence simply came as a relief.
    Just as the lake forgot the impact of a stone or the touch of the wind, Carolina and Turri returned to their familiar habits. That fall, he made an intricate set of wings out of saplings and twigs, copying from the skeleton of some small bird he unearthed during a walk through the forest. Carolina helped him line the frame with fallen leaves, which Turri half hoped might have similar properties to feathers. After weeks of work, Turri tested them himself with a jump from the roof of Carolina’s