I was still smiling when I opened the door to my townhouse. I threw my coat onto my couch and tried not to overthink anything. I said hi to my two Siamese fighting fish, Ali and Bruce, and asked Spike how his day was. Spike was a cactus I’d had for years, but I still spoke to him. He sat on the windowsill, ever silent. When Rob and I split, he remarked on the irony of me having two fish who lived in separate tanks, never allowed to touch, and a prickly—very untouchable—cactus. I didn’t care what it said about me. It made me love Ali, Bruce, and Spike a little bit more. I sprayed Spike with the water bottle. “Cheer up. It’ll be summer soon enough,” I told him.

I threw dinner in the oven, pulled on my running gear, and hit the pavement for half an hour while my roast for one cooked, but I couldn’t get something out of my head. The book he was reading… It had an unusual cover: red and some vine-looking thing. It was distinctive, and for some strange reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So later on, as I sat at the table and ate my dinner, I opened up my laptop and began a search. It took a while, but I was almost certain I’d found it. Well, I found the cover, but the book made no sense.

It was an old book, mid-eighteenth century to be exact, by French Revolutionist author George Sand. It was called Mauprat, had won literary acclaim for its time, and was considered a great from anyone who knew anything about French literature.

Was that really what he was reading?

I stared at the cover, and I pictured him smiling and blushing, hiding behind his book, bookmark in hand. This book. This book by some old French author almost two hundred years ago.

It was definitely the same. Obviously the book had had dozens of different covers over the years, but this one was distinct and unusual.

And I was distinctly, unusually, very much intrigued.

Most guys I knew didn’t read much. Well, they read about keto diets and shredding, or the financial review or sports pages of the paper, but never literature. Let alone literature in a different language from a different century.

Yes, I was intrigued.

The next day, the bus was full again. The weather was drizzly and the wind was cold, and someone had already taken the seat next to me. When Jordan got on the bus, he appeared hopeful and he smiled as soon as he saw me, but when he realised the bus was full, he let out a visible sigh and trudged up the back.