I did not plan the bookstore.
That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward — the fact that it was genuinely accidental, unengineered, a collision of two people's Saturday afternoons with no architecture behind it. I had not manufactured it. I had not known he would be there. If I had, I might have chosen a different bookstore entirely, which was its own kind of information about where my resolve stood on a given Saturday in late October.
The bookstore was on Court Street in Cobble Hill — small, independent, the kind of place that smelled like paper and wood polish and took its fiction section seriously. I had been going there since college. I went when I needed to think, which meant I went fairly often, and I went alone, which meant I knew the layout well enough to navigate it with
