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Fritz stopped trilling. The hush resumed.

“Sometimes dreams are just a feeling, though.” She shifted against him. “You’re scared, or you’re happy. I might have had one of those.”

“How did you feel?” He closed his eyes again.

“Happy.” It was a sigh.

He felt her inhale.

“Alan,” she whispered, “is this really the first time you’ve slept beside someone?”

“Yes,” he said, throat constricting as he waited for her to ask him why.

“Was it as bad as you feared?”

He opened his eyes. “I never said I was afraid. I prefer to sleep alone.” He was squeezing her more tightly as he spoke.

“When I was young,” he finally began, and hesitated. “Nurses tied me to the bed.”

He measured time by Nina’s breaths. When she didn’t speak, he understood that she was making time, all the time he needed to say what he would say.

“Those are my earliest memories.” He lowered his face, so his lips touched her hair, its faint, sweet scent stronger than the ghostly odor that clung to the memories themselves. Boiled linen. Rancid linseed. His mother’s heavy powder.

“The poultices they’d put on my chest were too hot, like wet fire. I’d flail but it tightened the knots. My mother would remove them, untie me. She was my savior. I’d cry if she left the room for an instant. That’s how it all started, with my unnatural attachment.”

Nina twitched, and he forced himself to continue.

“By the time I was five, she was spending every day at my side, and some nights too. My father didn’t try to stop it. He was always affable, with her, with me. He had his own obsessions . . . horses, parties, other women. He liked chess. He liked playing with me because he could win. Until he couldn’t.” Chess made sense. Sixty-four squares, thirty-two pieces, the movements of which were clearly defined.

“My mother—” He hesitated again. No squares here to guide him. To speak was to descend into disorder. “My mother would lie in my bed for hours. She’d sob and sob and bend my neck until I thought it would snap. Her tears would run into my ear or my mouth. Torrents of them. I’d picture my lungs filling.” A laugh dragged from deep in his chest.

“And you picture it still?” asked Nina in a low voice. “If there’s someone in the bed?”

“I can’t breathe if someone is lying next to me.” He pressed his face into her hair, inhaling more of her scent. “But I could last night. I can now.”

They lay for a moment in silence.

“Your poor mother,” whispered Nina. “She was afraid you would die.”

“She would sob and call me her angel. She would beg me not to go.” He relaxed his arm, allowed Nina to turn over.

“But it wasn’t because she was afraid I would die. She was afraid I’d get better.” He touched Nina’s cheek, traced the pink line left by the pillow. Suddenly, it seemed miraculous: beholding the uncomposed face of a woman in the morning, beholding this woman’s face. Showing his own face to her.

“In my suffering, I was hers, entirely. If I was an angel, she was God. I existed to prove her beneficence and power. And I wanted to please her.”

He could feel the slight contraction of Nina’s facial muscles beneath the pad of his thumb. The clear honey of her irises layered a darker shade of brown. She did have the deepest eyes he’d ever seen.

“She was pleased . . . that you were ill?” Her eyes searched his. His thumb traveled the satiny crest of her cheekbone, and then, slowly, he drew back his hand.

“She gave me pills to swallow. Nightmare pills, I called them. I’d take them and monsters walked around in my head. When I started spitting them out, the nightmares stopped, just like that. I had more strength in the morning. My mind was clearer. I think I knew then, at ten years old.” His mouth twisted. “I didn’t trust myself. Or maybe I didn’t want to be right. I was afraid of what being right made her. A monster.” His smile felt monstrous, all wrong on his face. “The monster wasn’t inside my head. She was hovering over me. She was real. It was real, the nightmare.”

She comprehended. He could see the change come over her, her nostrils flared, and she reached for his hand. He felt her squeeze hard as he continued.

“In Colorado, I heard a doctor tell her I didn’t have consumption. That should have been the instant I rebelled. I was fourteen. Old enough to run away, to find work at a miner’s camp or a lumberyard.” He laughed. “If they’d have had me. I was barely strong enough to lift my Latin grammar book. I would have made an unlikely frontiersman. I did nothing. I hid in my books. I kept trying not to know what I knew. We went to Italy next. Pistoia.”

“Pistoia.” She was hugging his arm close, his skin in contact with the stiff frills and cool buttons of her nightgown. The soft heat of her breast rose through the cotton. “Where Claud and the duchess are going?”

“Won’t be going,” he said automatically, then nodded. “Yes. A health resort in the mountains.” He paused. “She lied to the doctors, in front of me. She didn’t realize my Italian had improved, or perhaps she believed what she was saying. That I coughed blood. That I had stained handkerchiefs she showed them. She pleaded for a surgical intervention. She pleaded for them to resection my lungs.”