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Path, in the middle of July.
    The man held out his hand. “It was nice talking with you.”
    Kelly placed her hand in his, meaning to shake it as she would shake the hand of any other acquaintance. Instead they both looked at their hands, palm to palm, and he seemed as bemused as she was by the flush of lust that bloomed there like an orchid with an open throat.
    “Well,” she said, after a moment, when she could get her breath.
    “I’ll be here next week,” the man told her.
    “Good. It will be your turn to talk.”
    “All right.” He still held her hand.
    “Shall we exchange names?”
    “I don’t think so. I rather like the anonymity.”
    “Me, too. If you call this anonymity. I mean, I don’t even know your name, but I feel as if I know you. Certainly I’m telling you things I don’t tell anyone.”
    He looked solemn. “Perhaps this is something we both need.”
    With a little laugh, she pulled her hand away. “Normally I’m a very rational person. A responsible citizen, with a discerning mind—” She smiled. “I’ve even been considered judicious.”
    “I’m sure that’s true. But sometimes—” He gazed up at the Bell Tower. “Sometimes we devote so much to the perfection of our professional, public selves, that we forget to honor our messy, greedy, irrational, private selves. We—we lose our souls.”
    She studied his profile. His nose was long and high, a patrician nose marred by a slight bump that made his face, from this angle, resemble George Washington’s. “That’s very serious.”
    “It is.” Suddenly, turning and pinning her with the bright blue beam of his eyes, he said in a rush, “I’ve tried very hard to be a good person. To do the right thing. These days I feel beset by devils. From within myself as well as from without. I mean the divorce. I once loved my wife. I still admire her. I don’t want to hurt her.”
    He ran his hands through his thick hair. When he was done, his hair stood out every which way, an oddly endearing sight. All at once he seemed young, a confused but eager boy.
    “She’s a public person, my wife. In a way, the burden of her celebrity’s imposed on me. There’s no one I can talk to about her, or about our daughter, or any of it. But you—” He stared at Kelly. “You’re a good person, I can tell. And for some inexplicable reason, I feel I can talk to you.” Reaching out, he took Kelly’s hands in both of his own. He could not, it seemed, keep himself from touching her any more than she could stop herself from wanting that touch. “Let’smake a pact. When we meet one another here, let’s tell one another only the truth. And whatever we say to one another will remain just between the two of us.”
    Kelly couldn’t speak.
    “Oh, dear. Now you think I’m a psychopath again.”
    “No.” She cleared her throat. “Not at all. I’ll make that pact with you.”
    “Good. Then I’ll see you next week.”
    “Good.”
    They stood another moment looking at one another, holding hands, and then he said, “If you didn’t have that appointment, I’d suggest we go somewhere for coffee. To continue the conversation.”
    “I’d like that. But I do have this appointment.”
    “Well, then.”
    “Yes.” She nodded toward the chapel. “My car’s down there.”
    He nodded in the opposite direction. “My car’s over there.”
    “Good-bye, then. See you next Sunday.”
    “I look forward to it.”
    Still they stood.
    “One of us has to move, you know,” she told him.
    “Let’s do it together. On the count of three.”
    She laughed. “All right.”
    “One … two … three.”
    They broke away. Kelly hurried toward her car, looking, she realized, far too happy for someone in a cemetery. When she glanced back, she saw him walking rapidly away. He turned and waved. She waved. Then he went around a corner and was enveloped by the trees.

Three
    T ESSA M ADISON SPILLED OUT THE passenger door of the silver BMW before her mother had even