Chapter 1

When Amelia later asked me why I bothered the gentleman in the middle of his reading, the corner of her lip curling up dryly like a leaf, I could only stammer and say that it didn't look like he belonged there. By which I didn't mean that he wasn't welcome to stay for as long as he wanted. 

I just wanted to test if he was really real - the figure sitting out on the white deck, who had captured both our imaginations in between cleaning the coffee carafes and preparing for the lunch rush. 

I waited for a decent amount of time to compose myself that day, 8 seconds at least, then swooped in for the kill. By which I meant I was really heralding my own death. I knew that I have no built-in defense mechanism against characters like this, but when had that ever stopped me? 

At first Jo would come to the cafe by himself. From a Doc Martens weekender bag he would retrieve a stack of magazines and reference materials and sprawl them out all over the table in a way that makes the germophobe in me nervous, and makes Amelia's pockets itch. He would put his $2 coffee precariously on top of the entire stack to keep them from flying or flip-flopping away, then take the tower down one slat at a time and peruse the interior, plugging away industriously at his laptop as he did. 

Inevitably after 15 to 20 minutes, however, he would always turn to a ragged yellow paperback in his hand. He would slip the volume between his long folded legs and read discreetly under the table, which seemed meaningless since I could always see it from literally wherever I was serving on the deck. It was usually some pulp fantasy adventure tale from the 1940s, dog-eared with terribly small font, the kind of book that begs to be put in a little plastic bag and out to sea. 

There were other things that I could see about him, too. His choice of fashion. Up until eight months ago I was prep central so I hesitate to judge anyone for their fashion crimes, but mine were the crimes of my forebears, and his were definitely more of a conscious choice. No matter what he was wearing on a given day, no less than three-quarters of the sternum would be on prominent display. It was a dirt road to nowhere, dotted with brown and white and all the shades in between and flicks of very sparse, curly hair.

I have seen him button up incorrectly on purpose to achieve this rarefied look. I don't mean cropping the bottom button like some mischievous coquette at Brown. I mean full on buttoning the first button two floors down. Attaching as many as four buttons to a single buttonhole. His shirts were never properly fitted - almost as if he stole them from dead people - so simple laws of physics could not deter his unprovoked assault on fashion. 

The bottoms were not much better, and while I can describe the central issue with the precision of a seamstress, there are many reasons why I choose not to go there. 

So you could say that I already knew a fair bit about him before that first interaction. The first that could be called reciprocal. It was a bright day in early June, edging towards 100 degrees on Amanda's pelican-shaped thermometer, and the sun was in both our eyes. When I called out to him, he stared up from his usual seat with his jaw slack, that typical sunstruck face that is full of dismay and that in fact means nothing. 

"I was thinking you might want to try something to eat?" I said, the back end of the sentence raised in question. I had no idea why I did that. For the better part of my life, Grandpa had told me to hold in contempt people who start a sentence without knowing where it's going, who lack the force of conviction to tamp down the end.

Jo's face was a blank wall. Teetering, I gingerly held out the tray of complementary hors d'oeurves balanced on my left hand towards him - some weird canapé-thing Bullwinkle developed in the lab, the frothy grey-pink topping already withering under the pronounced heat. 

Through the miracle of contactless payment, I had never heard Jo's voice until that very moment. By and by, reluctantly, it slipped out, and I had to contain my surprise.  

"I'm sure I've eaten here."

"I'm sure you...haven't?" I said cautiously, smiling a little. What was happening to me?

"I have," he said, and slightly sat back in his chair, by which he implied that it was a far more serious matter than I could had imagined. 

As I smiled uneasily, gazing down at him, but not so far down as to be supercilious - and after all it was impossible, even at his sitting height, I could not tower over Jo - words from my absolute favorite public domain book reverberated with clarity in my head. 

"A proud, unpleasant sort of man," my chosen fictional father cautioned me. 

It was easy, as a child, to displace the image of my own father with the quirky and kindly Mr. Bennet. Now I chafe at any paternal intervention, real or imagined. Did Mr. Darcy's voice chip the very heart with its sharpness, its stillness? Did he also have sky-coloured eyes, that came up over his opaque Wayfarers like the waxing of day? 

Jo looked at me as if he was quite tired of seeing me. Then, in a smooth motion, he reached over and took the nearest canapé off the tray, such a light touch that I may as well have been grazed by a butterfly. And plopped it on top of his soiled magazines.