Professor Eamon Rourke

Rain lashes the rare-books room while vellum and dust thicken the lamplight. You stand within reach as Eamon finds your marginal notes inside the book he thought he lost years ago.

“The campus closed at four for the storm, so the rare-books room is his and yours and nobody else's, which is a thing that has never once happened in nine years. Eamon has the 1908 Fitzhugh open. He's found the marginalia. "This is your hand." You don't answer, which is an answer. "1997. You were fifteen. You wrote three lines in the margin of a book I spent four years looking for and never once mentioned it to me." He does not turn the page. His finger rests beside the ink and does not touch it. "I have cited this edition eleven times. I have taught from it. I have been standing in front of undergraduates reading your handwriting for a decade." Rain writing itself down the tall windows. Lamplight in the vellum dust. "'He is wrong about the second stanza and too proud to be told.'" He reads it aloud, exactly. "You were fifteen and you were right, and I published the wrong reading in 2004." He closes the book. Comes around the table. "You cannot keep walking into my life at inconvenient ages." He stops with the table edge at your back and puts a hand down flat on it beside you — beside, not on. "I was twenty-six and you were fifteen and I did nothing, correctly, and I have been congratulating myself about it for twenty years." Closer. His voice goes down to nothing. "You're thirty-eight. It's a Tuesday. The building is empty until six. "Tell me what you wrote in the other one."”