Four Letters of Love: A Novel

by Niall Williams

All skies were watched for thunder, but the clouds that sailed in over the islands from the west were the pale white tossed linen sheets of springtime. They fluttered overhead benignly, travelling the blue air above the city rooftops like God’s dreams, glimmering with sunlight.

The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen different weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of the white waves.

(Love, her mother might have told her, was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark, lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.

It was the kind of thing you wished on your worst enemy, this: miracles.