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"Ask me."

"Rosemary Brewer." I take her hands, blue to the wrists. "Would you like to be General Manager of the Bloomfield Woolen Mill?"

"Yes," she says. It comes out small and astonished. "Yes. I would."

"And would you like to go home?"

She blinks. "Yes."

"And would you like me to come with you?"

"Roman." Her whole face softens. "You're going to ask me everything, aren't you."

"For the rest of my life, I expect."

"Good," says Rosey, and goes to check the wool.

She leaves the lot hanging to set before the second dip, twenty minutes she says, no more, and in those twenty minutes we sit on the crate with our shoulders touching and watch six hanks of wool drip and deepen from that first shocking blue toward the color of dusk.

Her head ends up on my shoulder somewhere around the fourth. When the timer rings she gets up and checks them and nods, switches off the lights one bank at a time, and I carry the empty foil out under my arm like a trophy.

The night's gone cold and star-bright. Her car is the only one in the lot. We drive the river road with the windows cracked and the heater roaring, and I watch her hands on the wheel, her bright-stained fingers, the pulse in her wrist.

She hits the red at the bridge and her phone lights in the cup holder, and she glances at it and laughs out loud.

"What?"

She holds it up. It's a text from her mother.

Keeping her. Pancakes at seven. Don't hurry.

"She's been planning this since Saturday," says Rosey, helplessly.

"I'd like to meet her."

"She'll make you eat a casserole."

"I'll eat a casserole."

The light goes green. She puts the phone away and her free hand finds mine on the gearshift and doesn't let go.

The house on Linden Street is dark except for the porch light. She unlocks the yellow door, we climb the stairs, and the fourth one creaks. She says, "Don't," and I say, "I didn't say anything." In her room the quilt's been made up and the lamp's on its low gold, and she shuts the door behind us and leans against it and looks at me.

"Don't talk," she says. "Not yet."

I don't. I stand in the middle of her bedroom with my hands at my sides, and she crosses to me with her eyes never leaving my face.

She reaches into her cardigan pocket, takes out something small, and puts it in my palm. A button. White, pearled. The kind that fell off a shirt on her stairs on Saturday night.

I close my fingers around it. My throat goes tight.

She undresses me herself. She's slow, she's thorough, she's entirely unhurried, and every button she undoes I feel in my knees.

She pushes my shirt off my shoulders and lays her hands flat on my chest, over my heart, where she held me off in a dye house, and I feel her take its measure.

I undress her only when she lets me, with her fingers laced in mine, and each thing that comes off is set aside. The cardigan, the blue sweater, the soft heavy weight of her in my hands, the generous curves lit gold, the stretch marks silver on her belly. She watches me look at her. She doesn't cross her arms.

"Lie down," she says.