I ran at five thirty.
The grounds were still in the specific, held quiet of very early morning, the kind of quiet that existed before the birds had committed to the day, before the light had decided what it was going to be, before the house had begun the process of becoming itself again after the night. I came out through the back and the cold air arrived across my face with the particular honesty of pre-dawn Italian air that had not yet been touched by the day's warmth and was still entirely itself, clean and specific and cold enough to matter.
I ran through the cypress grove first.
The path through the trees was familiar in the way of things that the body knows without the mind directing it, the specific placement of feet around the roots that crossed the path at intervals, the slight
