Annie felt an almost physical recoil. He was thinking of someone else, obviously. The painter, perhaps.

And then it occurred to her: maybe not even the painter. Maybe one of any number of other people, other possibilities. As she had been: a possibility. A possibility that hadn’t quite panned out, certainly not in the way the person he was remembering had.

She didn’t know what to say. Her breath was coming short. He was watching her steadily, ready to smile again. “There was only one,” she said quietly.

“One what?”

“Night,” she said. “And actually it was an afternoon.”

His face changed. Maybe it was coming back to him, the difference between the person he was sitting across from now, and whoever it was he’d spent all those memorable nights with.

“Hnn!” he said. “I . . . I didn’t remember that.”

“No,” she said.

They sat in silence for a few long moments.

“Another brain fry, I guess,” he said, and tried smiling at her.

“Yes,” she said.

The waiter passed by just then, and she signaled him for the check, making an imaginary mark in the air.

“Hey, you don’t need to . . .” He reached across the table to her.

“No, no, I do, I need to go. I actually . . . my cat is outside, and I ought to get him in. I was in such a rush to . . . to get to the reading, that I couldn’t wait for him. The cat.” Never had the truth sounded more like a lie, she thought.

“Well.” They sat for a moment. He smiled at her again, a smile that was a lie, too. “Well, it was good to see you, Annie. A wonderful break for me from all the idle chatter of the tour.”

“I can imagine.”

He said a few other similar things, she did too, they managed it pretty well, and then the waiter set the folder with the check down, equidistant between them. They both reached for it, but Annie was quicker.

“Annie,” he said sadly, “I’ll take it.”

“Oh, let me treat you,” she said. She should pay for him, she thought. It would be like paying a tax on her vanity, on her foolishness. “It’s the least I can do.”

It was colder when she stepped outside, and some of the melt on the bricks seemed to have frozen, so that Annie found herself walking even more slowly and carefully than she had earlier.

He’d been apologetic about the mistake as they waited for her credit card, and she’d been politely, falsely reassuring. When she’d stood up to go, he tried to persuade her that they could start the conversation over. She doubted it, she said. And she did need to get back to the cat. “He’s real,” she said as she pulled on her coat. “And he’ll be pissed.”

Now, starting on her cautious way down Mount Auburn Street, she was thinking again that she was glad she’d paid. He’d taught her something tonight, taught her almost painlessly. Almost.

She’d thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not.

It wasn’t a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with.

She felt small and foolish. Exposed.

She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter. She didn’t even know Ian. He didn’t know her.

Though she wondered what he had remembered of her. Something, anyway: he’d recognized her, after all. Across a crowded room. He’d been ready with her name.

But it struck her suddenly that he might not have remembered even that. Yes, probably he’d read it, read it on the Post-it Olympia had stuck on the cover of the book.

“Thank you, Olympia,” she said aloud. She shook her head and laughed quickly, making her way down Mount Auburn Street.

She came to the bookstore. As she was passing its windows, she saw that it was busier than usual at this hour. Clearly, some of the audience from the reading had stayed on to move around the aisles, to stand among the shelves, browsing. She stopped outside, looking in.

And then she realized what it was, the detail that had bothered her when she entered the bookstore earlier tonight.

It was the chairs. The chairs were gone, the big, comfortable chairs Graham had loved so. The chairs where people sat and read through whole chapters of books they hadn’t bought yet and perhaps had no intention of buying. The chairs, and so, of course, also the floor lamps that had sat next to them, with their shades glowing a welcoming deep orange in the evenings.

Their absence made the big room look more like a store, less like a library or a study in someone’s home, and maybe that had been one of Sid and Olympia’s reasons for getting rid of them; but she was overcome by a sense of loss as she turned to start her long walk home. She had sat in one of those chairs the first night she and Graham spent together, sat in it watching Graham behind the counter and pretending to read her book, October Light, while she waited for him to finish work so she could walk him home. She had read the same sentence over and over, and each time she lifted her eyes to look at Graham, he was always there, looking back at her.

The wait had seemed endless to her, but finally the lights blinked off and on several times, and the store began to empty out. She watched Graham talk to the last customers as he rang them up, watched him lock the door and turn the sign so it would say “Closed” to passersby, watched him turn off the lights and then come over to stand in front of her in the partial dark—the bluish light from the streetlamp reached in only at the front of the store.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” he said in his deep, rumbling voice. “You’ve got a promise to keep.”

Now, making her way down the snowy streets, she was thinking of that other walk, their meandering, distracted walk down the summer sidewalks back to his apartment all those years ago.

She remembered how excited she’d been—almost dizzy with it: she kept bumping into him. He’d taken her hand, finally. Once they’d threaded through the nighttime crowd in Harvard Square (the jugglers, the people gathered around the street bands, some of them dancing), once they’d passed the tall brick fencing surrounding the dark of Harvard Yard and crossed Quincy Street into the emptier streets beyond, he had stopped and bent down to kiss her, gently, but searchingly.

“There,” he said, standing straight again. “That’s done.”

Ash Street was treacherous, worse than Mount Auburn, the slippery shoveled pathways in front of the houses narrowed by the heaped-up snow on both sides. Sometimes there was no path at all, so that Annie had to climb over the crusted bank and then more or less skid down it on the outer side in order to walk in the street, watching for another cleared sidewalk to open up.

Most of the houses she passed were lighted inside. Here and there you could see someone, usually reading, sometimes watching television. In one case, a pair making music, he on the violin, she the piano. You could faintly hear its sweetness ringing out into the icy dark. Annie felt surprising tears rise in her eyes.

Now she came to Garden Street and turned left. The wider, civilized sidewalks here in front of the church and then the hotel were shoveled and salted, so for several blocks she could walk almost normally. She felt her body relax.

But when she crossed the street at the light and turned right into the relative darkness of Chauncey Street, her pace changed. She began to make her way more cautiously again down the icy sidewalks here.

32

Annie was in a strange room as she came up from somewhere black. From nowhere—a deep, deep hole. She wasn’t sure why she was here, or even where here was. There were voices from beyond a curtain, far away.

Someone came in and bent over her, looking curiously at her. Frowning. A woman. Annie didn’t recognize her. Big nose. Iron-gray hair.

Now a pleasant, perhaps condescending, smile bloomed and changed the woman’s face. “You’re awake!” she said. Her voice was very cheerful, so Annie smiled back. “Yes,” she said.

The woman set something down on Annie’s bed and reached to smooth the covers over her.

“Much pain?” the woman asked.

Annie couldn’t guess who this woman was or what she was asking about. Then she did feel it, yes, pain. Her arm. “No,” she lied. “Not too much.”

“Good. We’ll try to keep it that way.”

Bending over Annie, she began to talk. She was going to send Annie home with some medication, she said. She started to tell Annie details of when to take it, how often.

It was confusing. Annie was trying to write it down as the woman spoke.

After a moment the woman stopped, right in the middle of what she’d been saying. She was looking at Annie’s hands, still moving. “What are you doing?” she asked. Her voice had changed, sharpened.

Annie felt ashamed. “Just trying to get it all down,” she said. “There’s so much.”