Is the kind of smile she loves best: It’s like a sneeze, a reflex, a twitch, helpless and automatic, and it only happens when he looks at her.

It was real,” she said, her voice thick. “Wasn’t it?” He looked up at her. “What was?” “Us,” she said. “Last summer.” “Yeah,” he said, stepping back again. “It was.

But it was different, somehow, to be reading it here, where the actual events had taken place all those hundreds of thousands of years ago. That was the thing about books, she was realizing; they could take you somewhere else entirely, it was true. But it wasn’t the same thing as actually going there yourself.

He could be a fan of rock stars or tennis stars or the countless stars in the sky.

But Hadley understood. It wasn’t that she was meant to read them all. Maybe someday she would, but for now, it was more the gesture itself. He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.

Hadley didn’t know it was possible to miss someone who’s only a few feet away, but there it is: She misses him so much it nearly flattens her.

They were just so different, and she kept wondering if he’d realize this was a mistake at some point; if, once she stopped being the novelty, the random American, he would recognize who she really was – a nerdy bookworm, a happy loner – and move on.

Well, there’s an after-party,” he said, leaning back to look at her. “But I’m only stopping by for pictures, and then I’ve gotta fly to Manila.

They just stood there, regarding each other silently, the room suddenly as quiet as the elevator had been, as comfortable as the kitchen floor, as remote as the roof. Because that’s what happened when you were with someone like that: the world shrank to just the right size. It molded itself to fit only the two of you, and nothing more.

They were like a couple of asteroids that had collided, she and Owen, briefly sparking before ricocheting off again, a little chipped, maybe even a little scarred, but with miles and miles still to go.