We’d met eight years earlier at a coffee shop in Georgetown, when she corrected the way I pronounced the name of an Italian painter.

I pretended to keep my dignity.

She laughed.

I fell hopelessly in love.

We married three years later in Charlottesville, under white flowers and a string quartet and the tearful gaze of my mother, who used to call Adriana “too much woman” for me — though she always said it with pride.

I loved her completely, clumsily, without reservation.