When Zoë’s husband died she decided to travel. She was twenty-eight years old and had seen very little of the world, and this seemed like the best possible moment to leave Michigan. A friend from art school had been to the Arctic in the summertime once and she’d told Zoë about the landscape’s clear beauty, the wildflowers, ice-blue lakes, and slate mountains. Now it wasn’t summer, but that was almost the point. Zoë boarded a series of flights to the Northwest Territories and found herself in a lunar kingdom of shadows and ice, scoured landscape. The sun behaved strangely. The days were short.
“Trying to lose yourself?” Zoë’s brother asked, when she called from a hotel in Inuvik to tell him where she’d gone. Zoë’s husband Peter had been dead for four weeks. She had given up the apartment, sold or given away all of her belongings. People were concerned.
“Trying to find myself,” she said, which wasn’t at all true but had the desired effect of slightly reassuring her family. Losing herself wasn’t enough. Zoë wanted to erase herself. She wanted extremity. She wanted to be eradicated but she didn’t want to die. When she left the hotel she felt swallowed up by the landscape, by the absolute cold. By night she stared through the hotel room window at the northern lights, colors shifting across the breadth of the sky. She liked it here but she was restless and she’d heard of a town that was even farther north: Tuktoyaktuk, on the edge of the Beaufort Sea.
“The ice road just opened,” a man behind the counter in a coffee shop told her when she asked about it. “Should have no problem getting up there.” He looked at her doubtfully. “You got a 4x4?”
“No,” Zoë said. She’d sold her car before she left Michigan.
“I know a guy who’s going up tomorrow. Probably take you with him if you split the cost of gas. I’ll ask him if you want.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.” What she truly appreciated was the way the man in the café didn’t ask why she’d want to go to Tuktoyaktuk this time of year, or what she was doing in the far north in the first place. Over the weekend she agreed on a fee for gas expenses and got into a truck with a silent man in his fifties who navigated them seamlessly down a ramp onto the frozen MacKenzie River.
Zoë had heard the phrase “ice road” in the café without thinking about what it might mean. It meant driving on ice. Driving in slow motion with chains on the tires, fifteen kilometers an hour with the lights of enormous rigs shining ahead and behind them in the four p.m. darkness. They drove up the river to the northern edge of the world and then turned right and drove for a time over the frozen Beaufort Sea.
The village itself was like Inuvik only smaller, darker, more utilitarian, little windows shining bright in the permanent twilight. Daylight lasted four hours but the stars here were brighter than any she’d ever seen. She felt that she’d traveled beyond the edge of the world and landed on some colder planet farther from the sun. Aurora borealis in the sky most nights, shifting vapors of green and yellow that she watched by the hour, sitting alone by the hotel window wrapped in blankets with the lights out. On the third day she rented a snowmobile, got a cursory driving lesson from the man who ran the rental business, and drove a little way out of town.
Zoë liked the sound of the machine, the din and the forward momentum, but it wasn’t a smooth ride and she felt as if her bones were rattling. She stopped by the sea. She could go no farther. She climbed off the machine and walked a few paces to look out at the horizon, blue shadows of icebergs. The sun was low above the ice, the few scattered lights of Tuktoyaktuk shining in the near distance.
“I am not unafraid,” she whispered, to Peter, to herself. She had said this first, in the dazed weeks just after the diagnosis when they were trying to come up with words to frame the catastrophe. They had repeated it to each other in the final nine months that followed, a private phrase that conveyed hope and stoicism and terror in equal measure. The cold was getting to her now, her fingers numb inside her gloves. She turned and for a fraction of a second Peter was standing there beside the snowmobile, smiling at her in the fading light. He was gone in less than a heartbeat, less than a blink.
“Oh God,” Zoë whispered, “oh no, please, please …” It took a moment to restart the snowmobile; she kicked at it frantically, not daring to look up. There was movement at the edge of her vision, faint as a curl of cigarette smoke. She heard Peter’s voice as though from a long way off, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. The cologne he used to wear on special occasions hung sweet and clear in the freezing air. The snowmobile jerked into motion and her tears froze on her face. She left all the lights on in the hotel room that night and packed up to leave the north in the morning, a slow process at this time of year, performed in increments over a number of weeks. There were several runways that had to be navigated to get from the Arctic Circle to the warmer parts of the continent, and most of them were frozen over. There were long delays in northern airports, sometimes for days at a stretch. She slept on benches, ate out of vending machines, washed in public restrooms, and felt somewhat deranged. Her reflection was pale and hollow-eyed in mirrors and darkened windows, hair standing up in all directions. It wasn’t until she was sitting in the airport in Edmonton two and a half weeks later, drinking coffee after a sleepless night and staring out at an airplane that would take her farther south as soon as a storm cleared, that it occurred to her to wonder why she’d been afraid of Peter’s ghost.
Zoë arrived in the Toronto airport and spent some time considering flights back to Michigan, but she had no desire to return just yet and the situation seemed to call for a new continent. Zoë and Peter had made a good living dealing coke to college students and she still had a few thousand dollars at her disposal, so she flew from Toronto to Paris and lived for some time in a marginal neighborhood, trying unsuccessfully to learn French. But the lines and beauty of Paris reminded her too much of the architectural paintings Peter had been working on when they’d met at art school and her money dwindled rapidly there, so she left France and began a slow, directionless slide across the continent, heading mostly south and east.
Zoë didn’t have much money now. There were dark little places in winter where she didn’t speak the language, and she occasionally forgot which town she was in. She found a job busing tables in Slovakia for a while. She heard there were resort jobs to be had on the Croatian coast, so she made her way through Hungary and then worked for some months as a waitress near the Adriatic Sea. On the day she saw Peter walking across the town square she packed her things and resumed a halting eastward migration, through Bosnia and Herzegovina, across a corner of Serbia and through Albania, toward Greece. It was important in those days to keep moving. She saw Peter sometimes, always at a slight distance, moving through crowds in various countries. Not looking at her, not sick anymore, seemingly in somewhat of a rush. She was perfectly aware every time that it couldn’t possibly be him—Peter was buried in her family’s plot in Ann Arbor—but that didn’t make her see him any less often.
“I’m worried about you,” her brother said. He persisted in keeping in contact, which was thoughtful but also somehow annoying. She was trying to drift across a landscape without remembering and he kept pinning her to home.
“There’s no need to worry,” she replied. “I’m just traveling a little.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I don’t have a home,” she said. “I’m like that song. I’m a rolling stone.”
“Have you been drinking?” he asked.
She didn’t see that this was any of his business. She took a long pull of whiskey before she answered him. “Of course not. And even if I was drinking, what difference would it make? Haven’t I always been the black sheep?” This was in Albania, at a pay phone in the lobby of a rundown hotel near the Greek border. The clerk glared at her from behind the front desk but said nothing.
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve always been,” her brother said. “All that matters is that everyone’s worried, Zoë, we all love you,” and she understood from his voice how tired she’d made him. “We all want you to come home.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I lost Peter there.”
* * *
In Greece, after two years of travel, she discovered that she could sell landscape paintings to tourists. Zoë disliked painting landscapes. She had other interests. On the days when she painted landscapes she spent a lot of time swearing at the canvas. In her last three years in the United States she’d taken to painting extreme close-ups of liquid in glasses and she’d felt that she’d found something, if not her mature style than the style that might lead to it. She’d loved the way glass and ice and liquid caught the light, the warmth of red wine in a low-lit room, the suspension of bubbles in champagne, in seltzer, lime slices trapped among ice cubes with tiny bubbles clinging silver to the peel. Her work had been shown in galleries. She’d entertained thoughts of a brilliant future. It was difficult to paint landscapes again after all these years of ice cubes and extreme martini-glass close-ups, after the two years of traveling and not painting at all, but on the other hand she was nearly out of money.
She lived in a dilapidated inn by the sea, where she cleaned and helped the cook in exchange for a room, and sold paintings to tourists for food money. Her life wasn’t unpleasant. She had come to realize the value of southern countries: she would never have imagined this quality of sunlight, the way it bleached the landscape, the way it seemed to pass through her, the way it burned away the darkest parts of her thoughts. She spent a lot of time on the beach with a fifth of whiskey, disappearing into brilliant light. She attracted frowns from passersby but she didn’t think it was such a terrible thing, actually, drinking a little by the sea. She didn’t see why people had to be so judgmental about it.
Zoë had been in Greece for six months when she decided to keep moving. She knew she wanted to remain in a southern country and she spent a long time studying maps of India, but she was afraid of malaria and she wasn’t sure how a person would go about getting vaccination shots in Greece. She’d always wanted to see Venice, so she spent two weeks trying to sell the last of her landscape paintings, abandoned the ones she couldn’t sell along the beach in the early morning, took a bus to Athens, and then a cheap flight to Rome. She did crossword puzzles and read the International Herald Tribune all the way to Italy, where she found upon arrival that she had just enough money left to get to Venice by train.
It was September and a tide had overtaken the city. The water had risen over the streets and tourists moved slowly on walkways, wearing strange boots that looked like bright plastic shopping bags tied up to their knees. In a doorway near the train station she counted the last of her money. Eighteen euros and eighty-seven cents. Her bank account was empty, and she had no credit cards. She didn’t want to spend money on a vaporetto so she made her way on foot through the drowning city, trying not to think about how little money she had or what might become of her now. There was an unexpected pleasure in wading through the water and getting her shoes wet, childhood memories of splashing in puddles with her dog.
Zoë came upon St. Mark’s Square, turned now into a shallow lake. She waded out over the cobblestones in water up to her knees and stood before the domes and archways of St. Mark’s Cathedral, pigeons wheeling through the air above her, and this was when she realized that she’d had it wrong: it wasn’t that she’d always wanted to come to Venice, it was that Peter had always wanted to come to Venice. He had painted this cathedral from photographs a dozen times. He was everywhere.
She turned away and left the square, but within minutes she had landed in another of Peter’s paintings. She looked up from a bridge and was ambushed by memory. Detroit, the year before Peter got sick, their apartment filled with canvasses, a Sunday afternoon: “It’s called the Bridge of Sighs,” Peter said, and stepped back from the easel so she could see what he’d done. All this time later here it was before her, an enclosed white bridge with two stone-grated windows high over the canal, somehow dimmer in life than it had been in her husband’s luminous paintings.
She crossed the bridge and spent some time wandering, watching the movement of boats from the flooded sides of canals, from the arcing bridges, these crafts gliding on the water streets. She came upon a narrow canal that Peter had never painted, a place where the water hadn’t reached the level of the promenade, and for the first time all day she was perfectly alone. She had lost track of where she was. A residential quarter far from St. Mark’s Square, houses crowded tall and silent on either side. The water of the canal was almost still.
Zoë sat on a step and pulled her knees in close to her chest. She would have to buy food soon and then the eighteen euros would deplete still further. She’d been dimly aware of how little money she had when she’d bought the train ticket but it somehow hadn’t registered, all she’d really thought of was the next destination, and now she didn’t have the money to either get out of Venice or stay here. She could call her family, but she knew they’d only buy her a plane ticket back to Michigan. She could go to the American consulate, but what would they do except return her to the United States? She was looking at the rippling shadows the houses cast on the canal in the end-of-afternoon light, thinking of how she’d paint this water if she still had money for paint, and this was when she became aware of footsteps. A tall man in jeans and an expensive-looking sweater, dark curly hair and sunglasses that reflected her own pale face when he looked at her. He stopped before her and said something that she didn’t immediately comprehend.
“Parla inglese?” she asked, in what was meant to be a steady voice. It came out wavery.
“Can I be of any help at all?” he asked.
There was a fleeting second when she thought she smelled Peter’s cologne in the air.
“I don’t know,” she said. No one else was on the street, and she wondered if he’d followed her here.
“You’re quite wet,” he said gently.
Her jeans were in terrible condition, now that she looked at them; soaked past the knees and filthy. Her tennis shoes were waterlogged.
“I went wading,” she explained.
He extended a hand. “Rafael.”
“Zoë.”
“Zoë, may I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“You may,” she said. There was no reason why not. She wasn’t one to decline offers of coffee from strange men. She hadn’t had coffee all day, or food for that matter, and it was nearly evening. “Would you mind buying me dinner instead?” she asked.
“Tell me about yourself,” Rafael said. He had taken her to a small dark restaurant not far from where he’d found her, a place so narrow that she might have walked past it without noticing. The street outside was shadowed and still. He’d led her to a table in a far back corner, and now he was sipping red wine while she attacked a plate of pasta.
“I’m a painter,” she said. “I was a painter, I mean.”
“I see. And where are you from?”
“The United States. But I’ve been traveling for a long time.”
“You’re traveling alone?”
“I am,” she said.
“Do you have any family?”
“A brother. I haven’t spoken to him in a while.” Memories of a pay phone in a hotel lobby in Albania, the desk clerk glaring as she capped the whiskey.
“There’s no one else?”
“My parents died in a car accident when I was little.” This wasn’t at all true—her parents were a seldom-thought-of presence in the suburbs of Ann Arbor, probably worried about her, faded to shadows now—but wasn’t she free to reinvent herself? This wasn’t her continent. “I have no children.”
“But you’re married,” he said. She still wore the ring.
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry. How long have you been traveling, Zoë?”
“Two years? Maybe three. I haven’t really kept track.”
“A drifter.” Rafael smiled to soften the blow of the word.
She had been reaching for her wine glass, but found herself stilled by the idea. Memories of Greece, of Slovakia, of the Arctic, dark cities. “I suppose,” she said. “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”
“I have a confession to make.” Rafael had taken off his sunglasses. His eyes were blue, and she thought him handsome; there was an easy grace in every movement, a confidence in his gaze. She liked his smile.
“What sort of confession?” She was interested in the confession, but more interested in her pasta. It was the first time she’d eaten that day and she was having a hard time chewing slowly.
“I followed you for a while before I approached you.”
A quick bright star of light caught in an ice cube as she raised her water glass to her lips.
“Really,” she said.
“And my interest, if I may be entirely candid, was partly economic in nature. You appear to be—forgive me for speaking so bluntly—a girl of limited means.”
“You could say that.” Zoë was aware of her appearance. She knew she hadn’t been paying enough attention to it. The cuffs of her sweater were fraying and a seam was coming apart at the shoulder. It had been some time since she’d washed her hair.
“It happens,” he said, “that there’s a job I need done. It would take no more than an hour of your time.”
She had all at once the same feeling she’d had those years ago on the ice outside Tuktoyaktuk, when for an instant she’d thought she’d seen Peter standing on top of the snow and she’d been seized by a desperate desire to flee. Rafael’s questions, she couldn’t help but notice, seemed designed to establish that she was alone in the world. Put down your glass, she told herself. Stand up from the table, thank Rafael for the meal, and walk out of the restaurant.
“What kind of job?” she asked, instead of doing any of these things.
“A simple delivery.”
“Of what?”
“A small package,” he said. “It happens to be a matter of the utmost delicacy. You’ll deliver a small package to an address near here, and in return I’ll pay you a hundred euros.”
“In advance.”
“Half in advance, half when you return.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be waiting for you here, at this table.”
“We’re doing this now?” she asked.
“In thirty minutes,” he said.
“Why would you send someone you don’t know, if it’s a matter of utmost delicacy?”
“You’re at hand,” he said. “All you have to do is knock on the door, and tell whoever answers that you have a message from Rafael. You’ll step into the building, give them the package, and you’ll be on your way.”
“And you’ll pay me a hundred euros for that?”
“It’s important to me to see that the package gets delivered, but it isn’t possible for me to do it myself.”
“I see.” There were things she could accomplish with a hundred euros. She could pay for a hostel for a few nights, and perhaps that would be long enough to find a new job. It was suddenly possible that she hadn’t reached the end after all. She wanted very much not to go home.
The package was a rectangular box no larger than a deck of playing cards, wrapped neatly in brown paper. Rafael slid it across the table following the dessert course, extracted fifty euros from a wad in his pocket, and pressed the money into her hand. “The rest when you return,” he said. He nodded at someone behind her, and when she looked up a man who had been sitting at the bar when they came in was standing by her side. “My friend will walk you to the address.”
She felt unsteady as she stood. Perhaps she’d had slightly too much wine. Rafael’s friend said nothing, only nodded to her and set off for the door.
“Goodbye, Zoë,” Rafael said. He winked at her. She looked back as they left the restaurant, and he was speaking softly and urgently into a cell phone.
Zoë held the package in both hands. It was curiously light. She was worried that it might be fragile, and it was certainly important; Rafael’s friend kept glancing at it as they walked. She wondered if it could possibly be jewelry—a blood diamond? She wanted to ask, but she feared the question was indiscreet and he seemed to be a man not given to talking. Her feet were cold and wet in her sneakers. At least the tide had receded. They were in a corner of Venice that seemed all but deserted, buildings pressed close on either side of the street. Night had fallen and the streetlamps were few and far between, pools of light spilling over cobblestones and walls.
“Here,” Rafael’s friend said. It was the first word he had spoken to her. They had stopped before a narrow stone building. He rang the doorbell and was gone almost instantly, sliding into the shadow of a nearby doorway. She knew he hadn’t gone far but she felt acutely alone on the silent street. The graveyard stillness of a city without cars.
The man who opened the door was very old, stooped and blurry-eyed in an impeccable black suit. It seemed to Zoë that he couldn’t see her very well.
“I have something for you,” she said. “A message from Rafael.”
He considered this for a moment before he stepped back to let her enter. She found herself in a dimly lit foyer, wallmounted lamps casting shadows on the walls, a black lacquered sideboard with a potted white orchid gleaming in the half-light. She was painfully aware of how dirty her clothes were, how ragged and wet. He closed the door behind her.
“Here,” she said, and tried to give him the box, but he shook his head and gestured for her to follow him. She thought about turning and slipping back out into the street, leaving the box by the orchid and running away, but she was seized by curiosity. She wanted to see what came next. She wanted to do the job correctly and return to Rafael for the other fifty euros. It had perhaps been a mistake to leave her backpack with him, in retrospect. The wine she’d had with dinner was wearing off quickly.
The butler moved slowly down the hallway before her. His thinning hair soft and wispy at the back of his head. She wondered who he was, if he had a family, if he knew Rafael. Her shoes were making embarrassing squelching noises on the carpet. He opened the last door on the right and she stepped into a long, low room, a study. There was a massive black desk at one end, chairs and a sofa at the other. A man in his early thirties sat in an armchair reading La Repubblica. Everything about him looked expensive, from the high shine of his shoes to his carefully tousled hair. His shirt was pink. He made a show of folding his newspaper unhurriedly when he saw her, but she noticed that his hands were shaking.
An older man was walking away from her, and she had the impression that he’d been pacing. He pivoted sharply when the door closed behind her, but said nothing. The butler had retreated into the hall.
“Hello,” Zoë said, but the two men only looked at her. “I have a message from Rafael,” she said.
She held out the box. The older man came toward her and she saw the strain he carried, bloodshot eyes and slumped shoulders, a two-day beard. His suit was expensive but his collar was in disarray, he’d pulled his tie loose, nails bitten to the quick. He took the box from her hands and held it for a moment as if weighing it. She watched the color leave his face. He set the box on a low marble coffee table before the man in the pink shirt, sank down into the sofa, and closed his eyes.
The man in the pink shirt glanced at Zoë. He unwrapped the box carefully and removed the lid, pulled back the layer of gauze within. He let out a strangled sound in his throat.
The box contained a human ear. It had been washed clean of blood and it was small and waxy, blue-white, a porcelain seashell with a pink stone earring in the shape of a rose still attached to the earlobe. As she stared, the man in the pink shirt put his hand on the other man’s shoulder and murmured something to him. The older man was still for a moment, as if it took two or three heartbeats for the words to absorb, and then he began a slow downward movement that reminded Zoë of a marionette being lowered on its strings; he slumped forward on the sofa until his head was nearly at his knees, curling in on himself; he pressed his hands to his face and began silently weeping.
The man in the pink shirt sat still for a moment, looking at the ear. He carefully replaced the gauze, set the lid back on the box, carried it away to the far end of the room, and put it high on top of a bookshelf. Zoë stared at him, waiting, trying to guess what might happen now. His face was expressionless when he turned to her.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful night,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “Let’s go for a walk.”
He opened the door and ushered her out into the dim corridor. When she glanced back into the room the older man hadn’t moved. The back door of the building opened into an empty courtyard, houses silent all around them. She breathed the cool air and thought about running—but where could she go? The courtyard was enclosed, and anyway, they were already in motion, the man in the pink shirt holding her arm. He was leading her to a wooden door in the far wall, their shadows moving black over the cobblestones. Light escaped here and there through the cracks between shutters. She could hear a television somewhere, voices rising and falling, canned laughter. When she stepped through the wooden door she found herself on the edge of a canal, water lapping near her feet. The man in the pink shirt stepped through behind her and closed the door. Something caught the light just then, the quick sharp gleam of a gun in his hand. She wasn’t sure where it had come from.
There was no one else by the canal, and the buildings on the other side were dark. He took her arm again and they walked together, an unhurried stroll down the length of cobblestones with the water rippling black beside them. The slight pressure of the handgun against her ribs. She felt strangely detached, a sleepwalker in a long dream. Her thoughts wandered.
Once in Michigan she’d been held up at gunpoint. This was when she was dealing coke to art school students, and she knew it was dangerous, but no transaction had ever gone bad before and her guard was down. She knew as soon as she walked into the apartment that everything was wrong; the squalor, the way the girl sitting on the sofa was staring at her, the cigarette burning in an overflowing ashtray, the way the door closed just a beat too quickly just as someone said her name—Zoë, I’m real sorry about this, we’re just going to take the money and the coke, no one’s going to hurt you—and then she’d heard the click of the safety catch. Okay, she said quietly. Okay. She raised her hands. The colors of the apartment were florid, a fever dream of red and purple and orange, and she found herself staring at the curtains and trying not to look at the girl on the sofa, who smelled bad when she leaned in close to pull the wad of money out of Zoë’s jacket pocket, and then later out on the street unharmed she’d felt so alive, so giddy that she started laughing even though she’d just been robbed and snow was falling through the haze of streetlights; she looked up and she felt it, felt it fall on her face—
“I told Rafael that if he did this, I would kill the messenger,” the man said softly. He sounded apologetic but he wouldn’t meet her eyes when she glanced at him. His grip tight on her arm, their footsteps quiet on the stone promenade. Time was moving very strangely. She felt that perhaps she’d always been walking beside him.
“But I didn’t know what was in the box.” She heard her own voice as if from a long way off.
“It is a request for payment,” he said. “It’s an escalation. It’s a message that demands a reply.”
“Whose ear is it?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.
In Greece she bought a postcard of her village by the sea, the little place where she was living with the white buildings and the church and the endless light, and she sat on the beach at the end of a difficult day and wrote a note to her brother: Jon, it’s Zoë. I’m sorry for your worry and I just wanted you to know I’m still alive, I hope you’re alive too, I wish I knew you better, I’m sorry we were never close—
“We’re close now,” the man said. They were nearing a dead end. A boarded-up restaurant with a wide awning that reached across the width of the promenade, where once there must have been café tables shaded from the sun, and on the other side of the awning the promenade ended in a brick wall. They stepped into the awning’s ink-black shadow and Zoë realized that they were all but invisible to anyone who might be watching from a window, now that they’d passed out of the light.
She’d had a dog when she was little, Massey, a cocker spaniel with ears like silk who quivered with joy when she came home from school, and when it rained they splashed in puddles together—
“Here,” the man said.
They had stopped by the brick wall. Zoë turned to look at the canal, all rippling moonlight and black. Darkened buildings rising up on the far side, moored boats. What was strange was that she wasn’t frightened. She could hear nothing outside of herself but the sound of the man in the pink shirt breathing beside her, the movement of water. Both of them were waiting, but especially her.
“Step forward,” the man said softly, “toward the water,” and she inched toward the canal until her shoes were at the very edge. She felt the metal against the back of her head, the click of the safety catch being released. There was an instant when it seemed that nothing had happened, but then the moonlight expanded and became deafening and there was only pure sound, the gunshot flashing into blinding light—
Her brother making a snow angel in the playground—
Massey chasing a squirrel in the grass—
“It’s cancer,” the doctor said, and Peter gripping her hand so tight—
Prom night in Ann Arbor, the headlights of cars pulling up in front of the auditorium, the slippery tightness of her green silk dress—
Blue ice shadows on the Beaufort Sea—
“You have a fever, sweetie, no school for you today,” and a cool hand on her forehead, her mother’s voice—
“Stand up,” Peter murmured. His hand on the back of Zoe’s head, where the bullet had entered her. “Stand up, my love. Let me look at you.”