Juliet has sent me a note.

This is unlike her. Most of my time with Juliet has not been the result of such planning. The paper feels tender between my fingertips. It asks me to come to the last terrace.

The sun is bright when I get there. She is waiting for me, sitting simply beneath a tree.

She does not get up, and squints at me in the sun. She asks me, "do you know about olives?" She motions me down.

I sit next to her. I tell her I like olives fine. She searches me for a moment for something, but I do not think she finds it: she shrugs. "Here," she says. She hands me an olive. She says, "it's fresh."

I have never had a fresh olive before. I cannot believe the bitterness. I spit and it lingers, crawling across my tongue.

Juliet is peeling a peach. "Do you know about peaches?" I make no motion of knowing anything. She is so calm, pulling strips of skin away from flesh the color of the sun, trembling with juice. "Peaches are only worth eating now, in the sun, when they are best. The only way to eat all of them, which is almost enough of them, is to eat too much. It is easy to make oneself ill." She is gentle with the fruit as she carves a piece away from the stone for me, gives it to me gently with a thin hand. "It's fresh," she says. It is impossibly wet on my tongue, and sweet, sweet.

"The trick," she says, "is not to eat the peels."