The rule was posted nowhere and repeated every evening, usually by me, usually while his mouth was already making a liar of it. No future. No questions that required a winter. No sleep if we could help it. Summer was a rented room above a bakery in Positano, two weeks, and then a plane that would put me back inside a year I had agreed to live.

I am Elena. I am thirty-one. Alessio is thirty-two, and he works the boats in the morning and pretends, in the afternoon, that he does not look for my particular walk on the path. I had told him on the first night, in English, so it would feel like a contract: I am leaving on the twentieth. I don't want your sadness…