He’d seen her walk along a row of desks, and as she’d squeezed into the innermost seat, her right knee had bumped against the table. He’d heard the thud. A bruise larger than the palm of a year-old child, he guessed. At these words, Hongmei stood and shut the study door, then raised her nightgown inch by inch. Sure enough, there was a dark purple patch above her right knee. She stared at it, thinking back to that afternoon in the library. She’d arrived at a downtime, when most of the students were yawning away, the older ones not even lifting their heads from the desks.

How had this person inserted himself among them?

He said he’d spent much of his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in libraries, like Borges, except he didn’t write stories. He said he’d thought he was strong enough to break it off. He didn’t want to disturb Hongmei or himself. It was unfortunate that people had desires—he hoped Hongmei agreed with this point. She could prevent him from writing, but she couldn’t stop his obsession.

Waves of hot and cold spread over Hongmei’s body. Twenty-odd days of silence made him seem haggard when he reappeared, eyes dark with passion, but still as collected as ever, she dumbly imagined. She took her image of the ideal man and laid it on top of him.

He said, Please don’t reply—anything you say would only hurt me.

She wrote back right away, saying she was very happy to be talking with him again. Before she could press SEND, she felt uneasy and changed it to: Very glad to hear all’s well with you.

Five minutes later, he responded to say Hongmei was exactly the same as his daughter, always so careful not to reveal her true feelings, forcing him to sift through the haystack of her emotions. His daughter had departed so many days ago, and the only thing she’d written him since then was: Very glad to hear all’s well with you. He said, The pair of you seem to know better how well I am than I do myself.

Hongmei said, You seem disappointed.

The man said, Disppointment is my usual state.

She abruptly noticed that he’d spelled “disappointment” incorrectly—missing an a. Could it be that he was a foreigner? Say, Italian, Greek, or even Russian?

He asked where she’d bought that long blue dress with the white pattern; it looked utterly foreign.