"I'm sorry, love," Marcello said. "I feel like if I'd understood it better sooner, it might not have ended the way it did." He paused for a moment. "I love you. Is there anything you want to ask me?"

"Why do you keep saying sorry?" she asked, almost crossly. "You didn't do anything wrong."

"I hurt you," Marcello replied. "Whatever my intentions were. That's why. Is that what you wanted to ask?"

"No, that's not what I wanted to ask. I just don't understand why you keep saying it." She curled her arms around her legs, her chin on her knees. "I don't know what to ask," she admitted. "I just want you to talk to me. And I still want to know what I can do to fix this, if anything. If not fix, then make it better. Because all I can e'er think of when I've upset someone is that I must ne'er do that thing again, and I know that's not what you're asking."

"There isn't anything to fix," Marcello replied. "I'm not angry with you anymore. Everything's right with me, if it's right with you." He smiled at her. "But I do want to talk, and I don't want you to be scared of saying things to me."

"Everything is not all right with me," she said, not looking at him. "But I don't understand why." She gave him a tiny smile. "I would have given anything to hear you say you weren't angry with me anymore."

He smiled back. "Well, I'm not," he said. "Not even a little. Is there anything I can do?" he offered, tilting his head to one side, his fingers working the hoop in his ear around in a circle. "Would you like to talk about it? I know you don't know what it is, but sometimes just talking can help."

"You said you were going to talk to me," she pointed out. "I want to know how you came to this, and why you're asking me now, when . . . " She laughed suddenly. "It is a bit of an odd speculation to have right after one's own wedding, isn't it? When we're supposed to be so wrapped up in one another that we have no eyes for anyone else?"

"Well, yes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't talk, too," Marcello pointed out. "You avoid talking when things are wrong, and that worries me. I...it's not that it's just after our wedding. It's that it's just after the other me wrote me a letter and told me I was being an ass about this. And he was right," he added, a bit sheepishly. "And what you couldn't explain to me, he could, and I know that sounds absurd, but it's true. And I don't have eyes for anyone else."

She looked annoyed. "I told him . . . well, other-you, that you weren't being an ass, you were just angry with me, and that it wasn't as if it was a perpetual thing, we just . . . things just got out of hand this time." She grimaced. "I feel as if there's always something bothering me. If I told everyone every time something bothered me, I should be a nuisance."