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time around. I wanted to try again.’
    ‘Yes.’ She smiled at him, feeling slightly crazy. She ignored this feeling and plowed recklessly ahead. ‘When you’re finished you could come back, we could discuss it.’
    ‘Oh.’ He nodded eagerly. ‘You have a book club here?’
    Her mouth opened slightly. ‘No.’ She laughed. ‘Just me!’
    ‘All the better.’
    He smiled and Lydia frowned, eager to preserve the sanctity of this moment. Was he flirting? Whenever a man’s behavior was inscrutable, the answer was typically yes. She placed the book on the counter and her palm flat against its cover.
    He read the caution in her gesture and endeavored to correct himself. ‘I only meant because sometimes the experience of reading can be corrupted by too many opinions.’ He looked at the book beneath her hand. ‘A remarkable book. Remarkable.’
    She conceded a smile, lifting her scanner from its cradle and pointing it toward the book.
    When he returned the following Monday, he went directly to the counter, even though Lydia was busy with another customer. He waited to one side, hands clasped in front of him, and when the customer left, they smiled broadly at each other.
    ‘Well?’ she said.
    ‘Even more incredible the second time.’
    ‘Yes!’ Lydia clapped her hands.
    One of the book’s main characters had a condition where she couldn’t prevent herself from jumping off high things. She didn’t want to die, but she was constantly hurting herself because of this dangerous impulse.
    ‘I have this same condition,’ Javier confessed suddenly.
    ‘What? No!’
    The condition was fictional.
    And yet, Lydia had it, too. Anytime she stood too close to the balcony railing at home, she had to dig her fingers in. She had to press her heels to the floor. She was afraid that one day she would leap over without thinking, without purpose. She would splatter on the pavement below and the Acapulco traffic would screech and blare, swerving needlessly around her. The ambulance would be too late. Luca would be orphaned, and everyone would misinterpret the act as suicide. Lydia had run the scenario through her brain a thousand times as an attempted an tidote. I must not jump.
    ‘I thought I was the only one in the world,’ Javier confessed. ‘I thought it was a crazy fabrication of my mind. And then there it was, in the book.’
    Lydia didn’t realize her mouth was hanging open until she closed it. She sat back onto her stool with a bump.
    ‘But I thought I was the only one,’ she said.
    Javier straightened his body away from the counter. ‘You also?’
    Lydia nodded.
    ‘Well, my God,’ he said in English. And then he laughed. ‘We will start a support group.’
    And then he stood there, talking with her for so long that she eventually offered him a cup of coffee, which he accepted. She pulled a stool around to the far side of the counter so he could drink it in comfort. He was careful not to get foam on his mustache. They talked about literature and poetry and economics and politics and the music they both adored, and he stayed for nearly two hours, until she began to worry that he’d be missed somewhere, but he waved his hand dismissively.
    ‘There is nothing out there more important than this.’
    It was just as Lydia had always hoped life in her bookstore would be one day. In between the workaday drudgery of running a business, that she might entertain customers who were as lively and engaging as the books around them.
    ‘If I had three more customers like you, I’d be set for life,’ she said, taking her last sip of coffee.
    He placed a hand across his chest and bowed slightly. ‘I shall try to be enough.’ And then he said casually, softly, ‘If I had met you in a different life, I would ask you to marry me.’
    Lydia stood abruptly from her stool and shook her head.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Javier said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.’
    She gathered the cups in silence. The treachery wasn’t in