Romance

The bookshop was the kind of place that exists in cities only because someone stubborn refuses to sell it. Three floors, no lift, a cat of indeterminate age sleeping on the philosophy section, and a handwritten policy on the door stating that browsers were welcome and rushers were not. Leila had been coming here every Saturday for four years and had never once bought anything she had planned to buy.

The man in the architecture section was tall and had the concentrated expression of someone pretending not to be lost. She recognised the expression because she had worn it herself for the better part of a year. She would have left him to it — this was not a shop that rewarded interference — except that he was holding the book she had come specifically to find.

She waited. He did not move. The cat relocated from philosophy to a nearby windowsill and observed them both with the professional interest of someone with nowhere else to be. "I'm sorry," Leila finally said. "That's the one I came for." He looked up. He looked down at the book, then back at her, and did something she had not anticipated: he sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and said, "Pull up some carpet. I'll finish the chapter and then you can tell me why."