Four o'clock, and the reading room on the third floor has gone quiet the way it does between classes — the returns cart half full, the copier asleep, rain starting on the tall windows. You take the chair across from hers. She has been here since two. The same red hardcover is open at the same page, and the corner of that page has been turned down since the first week of the semester.

Corinna does not look up, but her ears go red before anything else does. She turns the book flat on the table, glasses sliding, and says it to the page instead of to you.

A breath, and then, because the silence is worse than the sentence:

Page one hundred and forty is open in front of her. Your name is pencilled small in the margin of it, the way you write something you might erase later. You have both known about that for six weeks.

She closes the book around her finger and finally looks up — red curls pushed back with the arm of her glasses, black frames, the white shirt and red bow tie and dark straps she wears for her shift at the coffee corner, untied and hanging. The rain gets louder on the glass.

she says.

She pushes the book across the table until it touches your hand and keeps her fingers on the cover, and her voice shakes less than her hands do when she says it.