Jake leaned back beside her. “I don’t normally read magazines, but I guess I saw it in the dentist’s office or something, and I really remembered it,” he said. “There was something about that article—I don’t know, it wasn’t one of those usual gee-whiz science stories. It really made me think.”

Leora usually laughed to herself about people who took her articles seriously, but this time she didn’t. Instead she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me you had seen the article—in the museum, I mean, when I told you to meet me at the store?”

Jake paused a moment before answering. “I know I should have said something, but I didn’t want you to think I had been stalking you. It was bad enough that I was following you around the museum.”

“You were following me around?”

He leaned back and groaned. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice me then, and I just embarrassed myself for nothing.”

She smiled. “I didn’t notice you then, and you just embarrassed yourself for nothing.”

They both laughed, he covering his face with his hands. His perfect ears had turned completely red.

“I saw you at my lecture, in the back of the room,” he said a few moments later. “Everyone else was taking notes, but you were looking right at me. I felt like I was having a private conversation with you. I wanted to find you afterwards, but someone else stopped to talk to me, and then I saw you walking away. You were gone before I could catch up.”

“I probably had to go interview some drug addict.”

“Well, I was kicking myself for the rest of the conference that I let you slip out like that. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you at the museum. Did you know I was right behind you in line at the entrance?”

Leora tried to remember going into the museum. To her surprise, she couldn’t remember that moment at all, though it hadn’t been so long ago. In fact, she couldn’t even remember whether or not there had been many people there that day—or even, now that she tried to think about it, where the ticket booth at the museum had been, or what the museum had looked like on the outside. It was shocking, realizing how things slip from the mind. Or was she simply too tired to remember?

“I came so close to tapping you on the shoulder,” he continued. “But then I thought to myself, Let’s see what’s she’s really like, when she’s alone. It’s really rare that you get a chance to watch someone that way. After you’ve met someone, you don’t very often get to know what they’re like when they’re alone.”