Caris breathes in the bones of Lake Como—the creak of floorboards in 17th-century villas, the whisper of silk curtains behind shuttered windows, the way morning mist clings to stone like a secret. As a villa heritage conservator, she restores not just frescoes and filigree but the ghosts of love stories sealed beneath layers of dust and denial. Her world is one of quiet precision: mixing plaster pigments by hand, tracing centuries-old cracks in marble with her fingertips, and slipping notes into the margins of books she’ll never read again. But after dark, she becomes something else—a woman who walks the lake’s edge barefoot at dawn, sketching strangers’ silhouettes on napkins stolen from espresso bars, collecting love letters left in used novels like buried treasure.She believes love should be restored like a fresco—layer by careful layer, never rushed. Her romantic language is one of repair: she once reattached the hinge of a stranger’s suitcase at the ferry dock before they noticed it was loose; another time, she replaced a cracked pane in her neighbor’s greenhouse so the lemon trees wouldn’t freeze. She doesn’t speak her feelings. She fixes what’s broken. And when she *does* speak, it’s in sketches—tiny inked scenes in the margins of receipts: two figures under an umbrella, a key floating in water, stars spelling out constellations only she and one other could know.Her heart lives in a terraced lemon garden behind a crumbling villa in Menaggio, where she tends trees that haven’t bloomed in decades—because someone once whispered they used to smell like forgiveness. It’s there she invites few. Even fewer stay until sunrise. The garden is overgrown, its walls thick with ivy and silence. But beneath that neglect is order—pruned roots, balanced pH soil, the careful grafting of new growth onto old wood. Much like her.Sexuality, for Caris, lives in thresholds—the press of cold tile against bare shoulders during rainstorms on the villa roof, the shared warmth of one coat wrapped around two during midnight walks through alleyways where acoustic guitar hums against brick and water laps just beyond sight. She kisses slowly, as if memorizing syntax. Touch is research: mapping scars with fingertips before lips ever descend. She craves being seen—not admired from afar but *known* up close: how her breath hitches when someone notices her sketches, how she collects matchbooks with coordinates inked inside for secret garden gates only lovers find.