“Jesus Christ, Omkar, I haven’t even done anything. How the fuck am I supposed to keep your trust when I never even did anything to lose it and you’re acting like I did?” Aria felt like her image of Omkar as the perfect guy was fading. The jealousy that was now governing his words and actions was a whole other side of him and it wasn’t one that she liked.

“Look,” he said, “you’re going to get mad at me, but I found the letter that that guy wrote to you.” Aria looked at Omkar with a confused expression on her face. At first, she did not even remember the letter that he was talking about. “The one written to you from Luke.”

He said Luke’s name like the name itself was a curse. Shame shook her body like an earthquake. Despite the fact that she had done nothing wrong, she began to see the conflict that they were in as being her fault instead of his. She thought about deflecting the shame she felt by getting mad at him for going through her things, but decided against it. Even though she felt pain knowing that he had to distrust her in order to do it, it felt wrong to her that the boundaries of “her things vs. his things” should even exist.

When the lights went off and Omkar heard the last click of the door closing behind the woman whose job it had been to close down for the night, he stepped out from behind the bookshelves and into the great hall. “And just what exactly do you think I said?” Aria asked him.

“How should I know?” Omkar answered, irritated that the argument had turned into a quiz.

“Omkar, Luke is a friend of mine. He lives at the car lot. He gave me this the day I went back there to see if the place had been deserted or not. What do you need to know? Would you have rather I burned this letter?”

“I don’t know what I would have wanted. I guess I would have wanted you to tell me about it when it happened,” he said.

“OK, fine, I can do that but you’ve got to give me a break too, it’s not like I’ve ever had someone to share this kind of shit with. Quite the opposite, actually, it’s been sort of beaten into me to keep things to myself to avoid whatever consequences.”

In the brief quiet that came between them, the deserted library seemed filled with an antique chill. Omkar played with the parchment binding of a book on the shelf next to him. When he looked back at her, through the dim light, Aria could see that his eyes were welling up with tears. Though she wanted to comfort him, she could not force herself to move toward him.