The Morelli mansion in autumn was a completely different place than the one she had visited in a delicate rose-scented evening of May. The old oaks that flanked the driveway had turned colors deep amber and copper-rust and most typically burnt gold of October doing its most intentional work and the scent of the place was woodsmoke and wet earth with something sweetly fermenting in the orchard beyond the east garden. The sky was the definite shade of blue that only comes after the first cold nights, a clean and vertiginous blue which invariably makes the objects under it look more like themselves.
They reached the estate on a Sunday. Adrian was behind the wheel, as he always was when they headed for Westchester, and he drove just like he did tempo most of the time efficiently, without any
