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She pulls the book out and holds it up. Persuasion. The cover is barely holding on.

"It's my favorite," she says. "I've read it mo— never mind." She sighs.

"How many times, Anna?"

"You'll judge me."

"I won't."

"You will. You'll do the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have several faces. You have the 'someone put the napkins wrong' face, and the 'I'm pretending to check wine inventory' face, and the 'I held a woman's wrist in a corridor and now I don't know what to do with myself' face—"

"How many times have you read it?"

"Fifteen."

I don't do a face. Or if I do, it isn't the one she expects, because she blinks and then looks at the book in her hands like she's seeing it differently.

"What happens in it?" I say.

"You're asking me to summarize Jane Austen?"

"I'm asking what happens."

"Okay, so—" She shifts her weight. Pushes her hair behind her ear. Something changes in her when she starts talking about this book — she gets looser, faster, her hands moving, the nervousness burning off like fog. "So Anne is twenty-seven and she had this — this thing, when she was nineteen, with this naval officer, Wentworth, and she loved him but her family was all 'he's nobody, he has no money, no connections,' and she listened to them and she broke it off. And then eight years later he comes back and he's successful and he's angry and she has to just — be around him. While he's angry. While he's paying attention to other women. And she can't say anything because she's the one who ended it and—"

She stops. She's been walking toward me while she talks — not on purpose, I don't think, her feet just carrying her in my direction the way they do when she forgets to manage the distance between us.

She's six feet away.

"And what?" I say.

"And he writes her a letter." Her voice drops. "At the end. After all of it — all the silence and the anger and the pretending he doesn't care. He writes her a letter and he says—" She presses the book against her chest. "He tells her he's never stopped. That everything he's done, everywhere he's been, it's been her. The whole time."

The room is very quiet.

"That sounds like a patient man," I say.

"Wentworth wasn't patient. He was stubborn. He was furious. He spent eight years being angry at her for giving up on them and then he realized the anger was just — the other side of it. The same coin." She looks at me. "That's why I love it. It's not a story about perfect people being perfect at each other. It's about two people who screwed it up completely and found their way back."

She's four feet away. I don't know when that happened.

"You like the screwing-it-up part," I say.

"I like the finding-your-way-back part."

"Even when someone walks away without saying goodnight."

Something flickers across her face. "That was a pretty bad move."

"It was a terrible move."

"Glad we agree."

"I panicked."