He listened properly — not the polite half-listening of someone waiting for their turn to speak but the actual thing, asking questions that showed he had heard what she said and was building on it. She found herself talking for twenty minutes about a project she had been working on for eight months that she rarely got to talk about properly because nobody in her life asked the right questions.

He asked the right questions.

She stopped at some point and looked at him.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing," she said. "Your turn."

He told her about his work — a case he had been working on, a legal argument he...