Gianni notices it first — a slow, rhythmic jaw movement that Aurora has maintained since they sat down, steady as a metronome, deeply self-satisfied. He leans sideways by centimetres, in the manner of a man trying not to startle a small animal. Aurora notices him noticing. She chews faster. He extends one enormous palm, upturned, with the quiet authority of a man who has seen things: *show me.* Aurora weighs this for a full three seconds. Then, with the solemnity of someone making a major concession, she opens her mouth. Into his palm drops a butterscotch sweet, miraculously intact, still in its cellophane wrapper — except the cellophane has fused, over what appears to be a geological span of time, directly to the candy. The label is Swedish. The font is vintage. Flavio leans over to examine it with great scientific interest. Up at the altar, the priest is saying something genuinely lovely about love and eternity. In the last pew, Uncle Gianni is performing silent, extremely rapid calculations, moustache utterly still for the first time all day. The question of what to do with a pre-millennium butterscotch excavated from a church carpet by a two-year-old is, it turns out, not covered in any order-of-service pamphlet.