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together would be gone. It would take away the safety I had felt with him and I hadn’t realized that it could be dissolved so easily.
It is easy to see things in retrospect…but I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical during that time. We were launching merrily down the path of sin. That is how his family would have seen it. But for two years, we had each other and nothing else in the world mattered.
One day remains particularly vivid. A brilliant fall day in October. One of the last summery days we had that year. The sun filtered through the many windows of the sunroom. The house was silent, as it often was. We had been talking for hours and I must have fallen asleep during one of the silences. When I woke, he wasn’t there. I knew not to go into the main part of the house. An unspoken understanding. I lay very still for a long time. Eventually, I slipped on my jeans, shirt, and jacket and made my way downstairs, my feet creaking on the steps. The foyer had a sweet, musty smell. Absent was the frequent aroma of garlic and incense. It was so dim that it confirmed that the house was motionless, empty.
I found him on the shady side of the porch sitting in one of the wicker chairs. He had on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and like most of the time, he was barefoot, smiling, but not the smile of his relentlessly cheery demeanor. He had a book but wasn’t reading. I sat awhile knowing it would be soon time to leave. The silence was comforting, as it often was when we were together. It represented nothing more than the feeling of security between us. As I was getting up to leave, he asked that I return that evening, unusual as it was. Most of our time together was not beyond the supper hour.
The sky was fierce, burning blue, the trees ferocious shades of red and yellow. The first chill of the snow that would fall that night was already in the air. The last summery day of the year was ending. The kind of day I have loved the most. The cold, gray season, sadly, just ahead.
It was dark when I arrived, and at first, I couldn’t see a thing. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and I saw the first lonely flakes of snow that