Fiona was in her room but not in bed. She was sitting by the open window, wearing a seasonable but oddly short and bright dress. Through the window came a heady, warm blast of lilacs in bloom and the spring manure spread over the fields.

She had a book open in her lap.

She said, “Look at this beautiful book I found, it’s about Iceland. You wouldn’t think they’d leave valuable books lying around in the rooms. The people staying here are not necessarily honest. And I think they’ve got the clothes mixed up. I never wear yellow.”

“Fiona…,” he said.

“You’ve been gone a long time. Are we all checked out now?”

“Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember Aubrey?”

She stared at him for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags.

“Names elude me,” she said harshly.

Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some bantering grace. She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to him like that of the stems of cut flowers left too long in their water.

“I’m happy to see you,” she said, and pulled his earlobes.

“You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”

He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull. He said, Not a chance.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published nine previous books-Dance of the Happy Shades, Lives of Girls and Women, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, Who Do You Think You Are?, The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love, Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, her Selected Stories, and The Love of a Good Woman. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Giller Prize in 1998; the Rea Award for Short Fiction; the Lannan Literary Award; England’s W H. Smith Award; and the United States’s National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Saturday Night, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.

Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short-story writer and three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction. Widely considered one of the finest living English-language short story writers, her stories focus on human relationships looked at through the lens of daily life. While most of Munro's fiction is set in Southwestern Ontario, her reputation as a short-story writer is international. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."