She curled up on her bed and pulled a summer rug over her, blocking out enough light for her to believe she could be anywhere. She drifted in and out of sleep, eyelids succumbing to the irresistible downward pull, only to open again at the gentle intrusion of some distant sound: goat-bells, and the far-off voices of children at play tangling with the steady thud of axes as woodsmen worked in the forest. Her mind freewheeled. Images came and went: the remembered pleasure of Elaaron’s fingers tracing a path between her breasts, Aldine’s distraught face as Irenya had last seen her, Mikey as a toddler, and oddly, the dress left soaking while she shopped at Harvey’s. She wondered what had happened to that dress, fine cotton, soft blue, mid-calf, with vertical pintucks from shoulder to waist. Su
