Paula agreed. They stood at the door Kate had walked through. She unlocked her car, lifted her long coat in behind her, shut the door, and sat for at least a minute before starting the engine. She’d been born in Swanton, Ohio. She’d had her appendix removed when she was nine. She didn’t like cooked green peppers or people in costumes or anything by Henry James. She had a mole on her scalp, just where her part began. With only this handful of facts, he admitted to himself as Paula drew hearts in the clouds she breathed on the plate glass, he’d begun to truly care for her.

They bought her a brooch and went home.

His wife had left because, she claimed, he was locked shut. She said the most emotion he’d ever shown her had been during a heated debate about her use of a comma in a note she’d left him about grocery shopping.

There was no reason why anything would be different, why he would be able to make anyone happier now. He was the same person. He’d always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he’d never been anything but this one self. Perhaps it was because physically there’d been little change; he’d lost no hair, gained no weight, grown no beard. He’d read a great deal in the past twenty years but nothing that threatened his view of the world or his own minuscule place within it.

Still, on the fifth Tuesday, as Mitchell made dinner during the lesson, the lasagna noodles quivered in his hands as he placed them in the pan. Nervous as a school-girl. He wondered where that expression came from, for he had never seen Paula ever behave this way.

Nervous as a forty-two-year-old bookseller was how the saying should go.

Kate had arrived with a small heart-shaped box of chocolates, which he’d set on a table in the living room. He’d been so startled by the gift he hadn’t taken in the rest of her, and now he couldn’t picture her in Paula’s room, sitting at the foot of the bed where they always sat (he’d often seen the indentation after she’d gone). Every now and then, as he went about preparing dinner, Mitchell glanced through the open doorway at the box of chocolates.

He was just putting the lasagna in the oven when Kate flew past.

“Where’re you going?” he said, unable to conceal his horror as she flung her coat over her shoulders without bothering to fit her arms in the sleeves and reached for the door.

“I’ll be right back.” The door slammed shut and he heard her holler from the walkway: “She’ll be fine.”