Why was she even doing this? Romance wasn’t a pros and cons list, surely. You didn’t tot up all your good qualities and hope they were enough to make the grade. But what was it then? It amazed Olivia that at her age she still needed to ask this question; she hadn’t figured out the answer. What made a person worth the risk? What made you fall in love?

“What are you thinking about?” Simon asked, glancing over his shoulder as he drained the pasta. “You have a very serious look on your face.”

“Do I?” Olivia was not about to admit she’d been thinking about love. “Just...this and that, really.” And then she blushed, which gave the game away.

“And what was this?” Simon asked with a teasing smile. “Or that?”

“Oh...” She could feel her face going positively scarlet, which was really not a good look for her. She had a comfortably round face to match her figure and when she flushed she tended to look like a tomato. “Well, if you want to know the truth,” she said recklessly, her heart pounding at the thought of her daring, “I was thinking about romance.”

Simon’s eyebrows rose as he put two plates of pasta on the table and then sat down opposite her. “That sounds intriguing.”

“I just wondered what made a person fancy another. Or fall in love, for that matter.” Had she gone too far? Time to get this conversation under control. “You mentioned you were engaged a while back. What made you fall in love with your fiancée?”

“I don’t know if I could pinpoint it exactly,” Simon answered after a moment. “We had fun together, we liked the same things, we shared the same values. Or I thought we did, until she moved on.” He shrugged. “Can you boil it down to a formula or an equation? I suppose scientists and philosophers have been trying to figure that one out for eons.”

“Yes, I suppose they have.” Olivia thought of Rob, her most serious boyfriend from a decade ago. What had made them a good couple, if they even had been a good couple? She wasn’t sure anymore that they had been; she had been the one to cool things off, at any rate, because she hadn’t been able to see a long-term future together. Rob had been nice enough, but he’d been ambitious and impatient about it, and Olivia had known she wouldn’t fit into his lifestyle in the long run.

“I think it’s more of a feeling rather than a formula,” Simon said, his chin propped in her hand. “One of rightness, that this fits, that you can be yourself, your true self, with a person. You can’t pinpoint why, although I suppose sometimes you can pinpoint why not.”

“Yes...” Olivia half-wished she hadn’t started this conversation. It felt like too much, too soon, but at her age, how long did she really want to wait to tackle the big stuff? “So, is it just you and your sister?” she asked in a rather obvious bid to change the subject. “Or do you have other siblings?”