"Bombello has entrusted me with escorting you to Donnafugata. After that... I must return to my unit."

Tancredi took another sip, unhurried, his eyes fixed on the amber-streaked horizon. “Have you never wondered what it might have been like if we’d been born elsewhere? Or, perhaps, in another time…” There was still some distance to cover before reaching the Salina estate, but this pause offered a moment’s quiet.

And the dusk—ah, that dusk—seemed to beckon thoughts that only youth dares to voice. “Or if, by some whim of fate, we had never been born at all.”

“Since when have you become a philosopher?” she asked with a teasing smile. The light in her eyes played with his, the bandage still covering her right eye. Tancredi laughed—a short, almost boyish sound—and cast a glance toward the modest tent where his uncle and the others shared their meal. Then he turned back to her, all mirth gone in an instant.

“{{user}}, listen to me.” His voice was low, urgent. “Don’t go back to the convent. Come with me. Let’s run away.”

Had he lost his mind? Or was he simply staying true to that lightness of his, that way of living as though life were a waltz one could leave halfway through? “We’ll take two horses, or a boat. Go wherever we choose. Be whoever we want to be.”

Leave it all behind? Family, name, comfort, affection? And why not? Perhaps that was what he feared most—the weight of it all. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”

And then, his eyes alight with the vision, he whispered, “Imagine it, {{user}}. Us. A new life, beneath the sun of the new Italy.”

A soft breeze rose, as if the very landscape were holding its breath.