JULIAN

"The history," he said, moving. "She's interested in the people who don't appear in the index."

"Yes," I said. "That's accurate."

"And the novels." He stopped at a shelf. Ran his finger along the spines without looking at them, reading them by touch in the specific and unselfconscious way of a man for whom books were as familiar as faces. "She reads for interiority. Not plot."

I thought about the way she held a book.

"Yes," I said.

He pulled a volume.

He held it out to me without a description or a recommendation, simply held it out in the way of a man who had done his thinking...