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regret this rash impulse.
    "You're a beautiful woman, Eliza," he continued, and I was relieved when he started to walk. "But that's not why I wrote to you. I want to spend the rest of my life with the person I met last weekend. I want to feel the way I felt when I was with you. And while I'm looking forward to our physical relationship, I intend to give you all the time you need to adjust to that aspect of our life together.
    Okay?"
    "Yes," I whispered, wondering how long that would be. A year? Maybe two?
    He was walking beside me as he had the weekend before, not touching me at al . I kind of wanted to feel my hand inside his again—and thought maybe I'd like him to keep it there.
    "I've only got a few hours before I have to go back— can't be gone two weekends in a row during the busy season—but I came as soon as I got your letter. To make plans. Have you told your parents yet?"
    "No."
    "Have you told anyone?"
    I hadn't known what to do. I'd answered a letter, but I had no idea what Nate's intentions were. Or if he would've changed his mind by the time he got my reply.
    "I spoke to the Mistress of Postulants. I didn't tel her about...us...only that I didn't feel I could enter the convent anymore."
    Even if I'd never heard from Nate again, that much had become clear.
    We walked to the park and then inside, passing a woman dressed in jeans and a purple sweater holding the hand of a curly-haired blond toddler dressed the same. A young black woman pushed a baby carriage past us. An elderly man wearing an unzipped beige windbreaker sat on the bench just inside the entrance. I noticed them al . And the vividness of the green grass, the trees that were still bare now, the velvety magnolia blossoms.
    "How long do you have before you need to be out of your room?"
    "I'm at college on fall scholarship, so I'm free to stay in the dorm until I graduate in June. You don't have to be committed to the convent to live there, you just have to be willing to follow the rules."
    The sky was bluer today than it had been in a while.
    The sun brighter. Yet nothing seemed familiar. Because I'd changed?
    "That gives us a few months."

    "I have to graduate." I clung to that goal as though it was all that was left of me. Certainly it was the only part of myself I recognized at the moment.
    "Of course you do," Nate said, and I think that's when I fell completely, irrevocably in love with him.
    Until then, my heart had ached to be with him, to bless his life in any way I could, but it had felt like a big risk to take. A perilous thing to do.
    Now it felt safe.
    Contrary to what my head might have been telling me, the words I'd written to Nate Grady the week before were not retractable.
    On January 22 of that year, Rowan and Martin's Laugh- In premiered on NBC. And I had a letter from Nate. He wanted to know if July 20 th would be an acceptable date for the wedding. Camp would be between sessions the following week and would be closed, giving us time for a brief honeymoon and to get me settled in.
    I visited my parents that evening. Nate had offered to go with me when he was in town, but I hadn't wanted to share my brief time with him.
    Late that night, I wrote him and said that July 20th would be fine. And that I'd like to get married in Colorado.
    I didn't tell him then that my parents had just disowned me.

    * * *
On February 8th state police officers killed three black students engaged in an antiwar demonstration at South Carolina State. Nate called me three times that week. We talked about the Orangeburg massacre, as the attack was being called. About his brother. And he had some good news. He'd found a house he wanted to buy for us. I told him that if he liked it, it was fine with me. In truth, anywhere with Nate was going to be heaven as far as I was concerned.
    Once I got past the initial wifely duty, that is. Nate and I still had not kissed. But I'd been doing some reading about the mating process and while I was trying to keep an open mind,