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took her hand.
    Surprised, Carolina looked at him.
    “You know that I love you,” he said.
    The words rang in her mind like an alarm bell.
    “I know,” she said, and took her hand away.

    The following spring, when Carolina was seventeen, Pietro marked his twenty-fourth birthday, which meant that he stood just one year shy of the age of majority his father had stipulated in his will. But for Pietro to receive full control of his lands and property, his father had also dictated that he should be married. Pietro confronted this requirement with his customary goodwill. “I guess the old man knew what was best for me!” he said at party after party, shrugging with a mixture of mischief and ruefulness that made the girls shiver with hope and their parents nod in approval.
    Carolina received this news with a terror so sweet she could barely distinguish it from thrill. It was impossible that he should choose her, but: he must choose somebody. Like a child with a lottery ticket, she understood the slimness of her chance, but until another name was called, while her paper ticket melted in her damp hand, she had just as much right to dream of stepping up to receive the prize as anyone. Her fantasies focused and became simple. She returned the pirates and invisible ink of her youthful dreams to the prop boxes in her mind, and began to construct realistic prayers: he might find her on the road during a cloudburst and give her a ride home. He might catch her glance across a crowded room, and smile. These new dreams were so modest that they never lasted any longer than a moment. Carolina never knew what might happen after she smiled back, or he lifted her onto his mare.
    Nobody, including Carolina and perhaps Pietro himself, ever knew why he began to single her out halfway through that season. Her mother was a remarkable beauty, which is what had led Carolina’s father to pick her from the crowd of local girls on his two-week holiday to a seaside town so many years ago. Carolina, though slightly taller than her mother, had inherited her thick dark hair, small waist, and pale, perfect face. But her eyes were her father’s, dark under a strong brow, rather than her mother’s delicate blue. The effect was so compelling that it struck many boys speechless and made the rest want to torment her in revenge, a project they embarked on so early in her memory that she never even thought to resent their taunts, but simply navigated them as she would any feature of her small landscape: a river to be crossed, or a hole to step around.
    But her beauty alone was not sufficient to explain Pietro’s interest. There were other beautiful girls who were not nearly as strange or difficult. They had gold hair as smooth as coiled wheat, rounder figures, pale hands that had not grown chapped from plucking at things in the forest. And that spring, every charm was on display, every gem and flower arranged to capture Pietro’s heart. Carolina could hardly have won it by outshining them.
    In fact, it might have been her terror that originally caught his attention.

    In early June, after a blur of spring parties during which nobody, including those who considered themselves his closest friends, was able to penetrate the mystery of Pietro’s intentions, Carolina turned her head as she walked up the stairs to the Ricci ballroom and found Pietro on the step beside her. When she had seen him last, he was halfway across the great hall below, where the servants had constructed a fragile canopy of twine from which a thousand votive candles dangled in colored glasses just above the heads of the guests. Carolina wasn’t actually hoping to dance: during all of the dozen parties since the season opened, Pietro hadn’t asked her once, and with the fierce, foolish loyalty of first love, she had turned away all other requests. Her plan was to stop on the landing and look down through the lights as everyone else looked up at them, something like the way God must peer