The winter was long and dark and quiet. I worked and studied and wrote poems and learned to cook things besides rice and beans. I saw Marisol once a month, for coffee or a walk, and we built something new and tentative and real, a friendship that belonged to us and not to Evan. She told me about her thesis and her family and the fight she'd had with her mother. I told her about the bookstore and the poems and the way the light came through my window in the morning. We didn't talk about him.
I saw Evan less often. We were still in the same class, but we'd settled into a kind of polite distance, the way you do with someone you used to know well. He'd nod when he saw me. I'd nod back. It was okay. It was something.
In February, I got a letter from a literary magazine. One of my poems had be
