On the willows there, we hung up our lyres

He lets himself stay in that memory, the stunned amazement still close at hand and still powerful enough to coax the rest of the world to fall away, whether that amounts to a quiet kitchen in a different world or a crowded temple, constructed by the scheming chief cultivator, at the end of a long investigation. "It had been more than twenty years since I fell in love with him," he says. "I felt too much."