Ten minutes and two pages later, I’ve got a rough sketch of it. This isn’t where I’d stop—if I were home, if I had more time, if I had all my stuff with me. I’m already thinking of colors I’d use to fill it in, and of how those big shoulders could become tiny canvases all their own, the tiny, clever sketches I could put inside....

“March?” Reid says, reading what I’ve written. It’s the first time he’s spoken since I started sketching.

I blink up at him. He’s leaned forward, elbows resting on the table, his empty cup of tea in the space between. If this is how he sat while I worked, then I guess our heads were bent together, and it makes me feel strangely powerful, to know that my sketching was drawing him closer. Now that I’m finished, I’m free to notice things about close-up Reid: In the low light of this place, his eyes are darker blue. The lashes that frame them are long, but they aren’t showy about it—dark blond, lighter at the tips so that the true length of them is hidden from the casual observer. He has a single, small light brown freckle on his left cheekbone.

I realize, snapping myself out of it, that his lean-back method is very effective for stopping spontaneous face-pressing feelings—not that he has those to worry about.

“March,” I repeat. “Only sensible choice, for this kind of letter.”

His brow furrows, his mouth pulling to the side. “How do you figure?”

I shift in my seat, unsure about how to explain this part to someone else, how I try to read letters for more than the words they spell out.

“Did you notice the store this came from?”

He opens his mouth, then closes it again before making that furrow in his brow even deeper. Then he says, even more formally than usual, “I did not.”

I resist the urge to smile. “I mean, don’t worry about it. It’s not as if that was one of the rules.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, the store was for western-style clothing. Boots, and clothes, and those—you know those ties that aren’t ties? With the . . . leather, and the thingy.” I gesture at my neck.

“Those don’t sound like something I’d wear.” He seems disgusted by the very idea, and I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing.

“The point is,” I say, once I’ve got it under control, “the store is sort of . . . odd. What it sells, in this city, in that neighborhood—you wouldn’t think of it, would you? So the sign, the letters—they should feel that way, too. Unexpected.”

“Okay.” Somehow he makes it sound like Go on.

“And March, that’s definitely the most unexpected month. So it had to be March.”