★ Title: Midnight in Montmartre

★ Voice Age: Adult (30 - 45)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

Elise pressed her back against the rain-slicked wall, her pulse hammering. He had followed her across three arrondissements. "You can't keep running from this," Julien said, his voice low, close.

She turned to face him. The streetlamp caught the line of his jaw, the desperate hope in his eyes. "I'm not running," she said. "I'm giving you a chance to catch up."

Julien exhaled a soft laugh, stepping closer until the space between them felt like a held breath. His hand found her cheek. Paris hummed around them, indifferent and beautiful, as the rain finally stopped.

★ Title: The Last Letter

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 45)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Southern American

Script:

I read the letter four times. My coffee went cold. Postmarked three weeks ago — before the accident, before I got the call, before I stood in the back row of a church and didn't cry because I couldn't make myself believe it.

"I should have told you sooner," it said. That was it. One line. Thomas had loved me and I had always known, and I had done nothing about it.

My phone buzzed. Unknown number. I answered without thinking. "Clara." His voice. Alive. "Don't hang up."

★ Title: Second Chances in Savannah

★ Voice Age: Adult (35 - 50)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Southern American

Script:

The magnolia trees hadn't changed. Neither had Nate — still leaning against doorframes like he owned every room he walked into. I set down my bag and told myself the flutter in my chest was just the heat.

"You didn't tell me you'd be here," I said. "You didn't ask." He pushed off the wall, slow and deliberate. "You never did like asking for things, Viv."

Ten years. I had spent ten years getting over him, and apparently all it took to undo that was one lazy smile in my mother's hallway.

★ Title: The Florist's Secret

★ Voice Age: Young Adult (22 - 35)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: British RP

Script:

Every Tuesday, someone left cash under my door and took a bunch of white dahlias. No note, no name. I assumed grief. It's usually grief.

I did not assume it would be him — rain-soaked on my Wednesday morning, holding one dahlia back, looking at me like I was supposed to understand. "You left this behind," he said.

"I didn't — those aren't—" He was smiling. My brain caught up slowly. "They're for you, Rosie," he said. "They've always been for you." I stood there with soil on my hands and absolutely no idea what to say.

★ Title: Borrowed Time in Tuscany

★ Voice Age: Adult (30 - 48)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

The villa was supposed to be empty. I had checked. Twice. So when I walked onto the terrace at dawn and found a man drinking espresso like he'd invented it, staring out at the valley, I said the most embarrassing possible thing.

"Who are you?" He turned. Dark eyes, completely unbothered. "Marco. The agency double-booked us." He tilted his cup toward me. "Coffee?"

"Absolutely not," I said. Then I sat down across from him, because the valley really was beautiful and I hadn't slept in thirty hours. "Fine. One cup."

★ Title: Stars Over the Harbor

★ Voice Age: Adult (25 - 40)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Australian

Script:

The boat rocked gently beneath them, dark water lapping against the hull. Dani sat on the bow, feet dangling, pretending to study the sky. She was acutely aware that Finn had not moved away.

"That one's Orion," he said softly. His arm grazed hers. Neither pulled back. "I know what Orion is," she said.

"Right." He lowered his arm, slowly. "I wasn't really talking about the stars." She turned to look at him. He was already looking at her — had probably been looking at her the whole time.

★ Title: The Space Between

★ Voice Age: Adult (26 - 40)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

He was three inches away and the rain was coming down hard enough that the world outside the doorway had stopped existing. I was acutely aware of his hand on the door frame above my head. I was acutely aware of everything, frankly.

"You should go in," he said. He didn't move. "You should let me," I said. He didn't move. The rain said everything we weren't saying, which was considerable. His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up and I thought: okay. Okay. Here is the thing that is about to happen.

His phone rang. He closed his eyes briefly — a full-body wince — and stepped back and answered it. I went inside. I stood in my hallway for a full minute before I was capable of taking my coat off. When I finally looked at my phone, he'd texted two words: I'm sorry. I stared at them for a long time. Then I typed back: For what? And waited.

★ Title: Inconvenient

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 44)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: British RP

Script:

The will stipulated that both beneficiaries had to occupy the property for thirty consecutive days before either could sell. Nadia read this clause three times, certain she'd misunderstood. She had not misunderstood. She looked across the solicitor's desk at the man she had spent four years successfully avoiding.

He looked back at her with an expression she could not fully read — which was infuriating, because she could usually read everyone. "Thirty days," she said. "Thirty days," he confirmed. "In the same house." "It's a large house." "It could be a castle and it would be too small." His mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "Your uncle always did have a sense of humour."

"My uncle," she said, gathering her bag with great precision, "is going to hear about this from me in detail at the earliest available opportunity." "He's dead, Nadia." "I'm aware. I'll find a way." She walked out. He followed, because of course there was now nowhere else for either of them to go. The house was, it turned out, not a castle. It had one spare room. The solicitor had neglected to mention that.

★ Title: The Enemy's Heir

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 42)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: British RP

Script:

I had spent four years systematically dismantling the Ashford Group. Now I was standing in Cade Ashford's corner office, hired to save it. The irony was not lost on me. Neither was the way he looked up from his desk — unsurprised, unbothered, like he'd been expecting me.

"I know who you are," he said. "Good. Then we can skip the part where you pretend to be impressed." I dropped my portfolio on his desk. "Your company is bleeding. I can stop it."

"And what do you want in return?" His eyes were steady. Careful. Way too calm for a man whose empire was on fire. I smiled. "Everything."

★ Title: A Winter in Edinburgh

★ Voice Age: Adult (30 - 50)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Scottish 

Script:

I ducked into the bookshop to escape the sleet and nearly knocked a man flat. He caught me by the elbow — steady, automatic — while six poetry collections scattered across the floor between us.

"Careful," he said. A voice like old wool, low and worn-in. "You'd have taken down half of Burns." "I would have survived the fall," I said.

He laughed. Surprised, genuine — the kind that changes a person's whole face. I found myself wanting to say something ridiculous just to hear it again.

★ Title: Not Just the Nanny

★ Voice Age: Adult (25 - 38)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American 

Script:

The rules were simple: professional distance, separate schedules, no personal conversations after eight. I had agreed to all of them. I had not agreed to this — standing in the kitchen doorway at midnight watching him make pancakes with his daughter because she'd had a nightmare.

He didn't turn around. "You're off the clock, Paige." "I know," I said. I pulled out a stool anyway. "Do you have blueberries?"

He finally looked at me. Something moved across his face — something I didn't have a rule for. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I do."

★ Title: One More Goodbye

★ Voice Age: Adult (32 - 50)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

We'd said goodbye four times in twelve years. At the airport when I left for grad school. At his father's funeral, where I held it together until I was outside. The night I got engaged to someone else and he stood in the rain and didn't say a single word.

And now here — a hotel lobby, same conference, both of us alone. He saw me before I saw him. Of course he did. "Marcus," I said. That was all I had.

"I know." He picked up my bag before I could argue. "Let's get dinner. We can figure out the rest after." I followed him. I always had.

★ Title: Say It Then

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 45)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

"I need to tell you something and I need you to not say anything until I'm finished." He looked up from the counter. He was making coffee, of all the mundane things, and I was standing in his kitchen at seven in the morning having rehearsed this forty times in the car.

"Okay," he said. He set the cup down. He gave me his full attention, which is something he does that I have spent two years trying not to find devastating. "I'm in love with you," I said. "I have been for a while. I know the timing is terrible. I know we said we wouldn't do this. I know you might not—" "How long?" he said.

"You said you wouldn't say anything." "How long, Margot." I looked at the floor. "Since the drive back from your sister's wedding." He was very quiet. "That was two years ago." "I know." "You've been—" "I know." He came around the counter. He stopped in front of me. He tipped my chin up with two fingers and looked at me like I had just solved something he'd been working on for a very long time. "I'm going to need you to say it again," he said. "Slower."

★ Title: Seven Years Later

★ Voice Age: Adult (30 - 46)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

The city has nine million people in it and he was standing in my coffee queue on a Tuesday. I have thought about this since — the statistical improbability of it, the particular cruelty of the universe — and I have concluded that the universe simply does not care about my emotional availability.

He saw me before I could decide what to do with my face. Seven years and he still had that quality of arriving fully into a room. "Cara." My name, in his mouth, exactly as I remembered it. "Hi," I said. Brilliant. Extremely articulate. "Hi," he said back.

We stood in line together. We ordered. We stood at the collection counter in the specific silence of two people who have said too much and then nothing for seven years and no longer know which register to speak in. He handed me my coffee when it came — he'd remembered my order, which I was furious about. "You look well," he said. "You too," I said. Both things were probably true and neither of them was the point. "Do you have a minute?" he said. I had been late for work before. I looked at him. "Yes," I said.

★ Title: All Along

★ Voice Age: Adult (26 - 40)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

It happened between one breath and the next. She was laughing at something he'd said — really laughing, the kind that closed her eyes and made her tip forward slightly — and Jonas felt the floor shift in a way that had nothing to do with the building.

He had known her for six years. He had sat across from her at hundreds of tables. He had listened to her talk about other people she was in love with and offered thoughtful advice that had cost him something he hadn't had a name for until precisely this moment, watching her laugh in a restaurant on a Wednesday, wearing a blue jumper he'd seen before. Nothing had changed. He had changed. Or perhaps he had just finally stopped not noticing.

"What?" she said, catching him staring. "Nothing," he said. She looked at him for a moment with the particular attention she gave things she was trying to figure out. He held his expression steady. She let it go, which meant he had maybe a week before she didn't. Priya was extremely good at figuring things out. He needed to decide, before she did, what he was going to do about that.

★ Title: Stop Counting

★ Voice Age: Adult (35 - 52)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

"You keep doing the math," he said. We were on the back porch. It was late. He'd noticed something I thought I'd been doing privately, in my own head, in a way that didn't show. Of course he'd noticed. He notices everything, which is one of the fourteen reasons I'm in this situation. "I don't know what you mean," I said. He gave me a look. "You go somewhere in your head and your mouth gets tighter and I know you're calculating the gap."

I didn't answer. He was right. Eleven years. I'd been doing the math since the first night, running forward — where we'd be in ten years, twenty, the asymmetry of it, what it would cost one of us eventually. "It's a reasonable thing to calculate," I said. "Probably," he said. He reached over and took my hand, unhurried. "Are you in love with me?"

I looked at the yard. The dark of it. "Yes," I said. I hadn't said it before. He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Then stop counting years and start counting that." I didn't have a good answer to that. I didn't have any answer. I laced my fingers through his and we sat there until the cold made it necessary to go inside, and even then we didn't rush.

★ Title: For Appearances

★ Voice Age: Adult (26 - 40)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

Week three of the arrangement and I had developed a problem, which was that I couldn't always remember, in the moment, that it was an arrangement. His hand at the small of my back felt like his hand at the small of my back — not a performance, not a prop, just a hand, warm and certain, belonging there.

"You're doing it again," he said, low, close to my ear. We were at his brother's engagement party and I had stopped tracking the room. "Doing what?" "Looking at me like that." "I don't know what look you're talking about." He leaned back just enough to see my face. "Yeah, you do."

I turned back toward the party. His hand stayed where it was. We were supposed to sell this to his family — that was the deal, six weeks, convincing enough to get his mother off his back, no complications, clean exit. I had agreed to all of that. I had not agreed to mean it. I was very much starting to mean it. This was going to be a problem for future me. Present me was going to get through the party first.

★ Title: Eventually, You

★ Voice Age: Adult (30 - 48)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

He had been patient for three years. Not passive — patient, which is a different thing, a deliberate thing, a thing that requires daily renewal. He had watched her rebuild herself after the end of her marriage, had been present without being intrusive, had cared without making it a weight she had to carry.

He had never pushed. He had also never stopped. And now she was sitting across from him in the same kitchen where they'd had a hundred ordinary evenings, looking at him with an expression he hadn't seen before — as if she was seeing him at a slightly different angle than usual and was surprised by what the new angle showed.

"What is it?" he said. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again. "I think I've been," she started, "not looking at something." He was very still. The clock on the wall moved. "I know," he said, softly. "I've been not looking at it with you." Something in her face shifted. "How long?" she asked. He thought about lying. He didn't. "Since the beginning," he said. She looked at him. He looked back. "Okay," she said. Just that. Just: okay.

★ Title: The Apology

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 44)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

He knocked at ten-thirty, which was late enough that I knew he'd been debating it. I opened the door. He looked like a man who had spent four hours in a car rehearsing something. "I was wrong," he said. No preamble. No defence. Just that. "I know why I said it and it was still wrong and I'm not going to explain it to death, I'm just going to tell you that I'm sorry and that I know what I said and that it won't happen again."

I looked at him. He met it without flinching. One of the things I love most about him — and I was aware, in that moment, that I was using that word internally without editing it — is that he doesn't squirm. He did a wrong thing, he knew it, and he showed up. No performance. No victim of his own apology.

"Come in," I said. He came in. I made tea neither of us wanted and we sat at the kitchen table and talked for two hours about the actual thing — not the fight, the thing underneath the fight, the thing we'd both been holding at arm's length for months. It was the most honest conversation we'd had. It started with him being wrong. I was going to have to figure out how to tell him that the wrongness was, in its way, the best thing that had happened to us.

★ Title: One More Night in Lisbon

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 44)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

My flight was at six. It was already midnight. We both knew the math and neither of us had mentioned it in two hours, which was its own kind of conversation.

"You could change it," he said. Not push, not pressure — just an observation, laid out carefully like he wanted me to be able to pick it up or leave it. "I have a job," I said. "I know." "And a life. That is not here." "I know that too." He was quiet. The city below the terrace moved in its patient, ancient way, entirely unbothered by either of us.

"I don't know how to do this," I said finally. "The distance of it. The uncertainty." "Neither do I," he said. "I've never tried." He turned to look at me. "But I think I'd rather try it badly with you than not try it at all." I looked at him in the dark. The city. The time on my phone. "I'm going to miss my flight," I said. He reached over and turned my phone face down. "Probably," he agreed. Neither of us moved to do anything about it.

★ Title: Snowed In With You

★ Voice Age: Adult (26 - 42)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

Day two of the storm and they had run out of things to talk about that weren't the thing they were actually talking about. The cabin was warm. Outside was four feet of snow and no indication of mercy. Rowan was teaching her gin rummy on the grounds that card games were neutral territory. They were proving not to be.

"You're cheating," said Mara. "I'm not cheating." "You're absolutely cheating. You just drew from the discard pile out of turn." "That's not cheating, that's a different game." "It is absolutely not — give me that card." She leaned across the table and he caught her hand instead of the card and they both froze, six inches apart, neither letting go.

The fire did what fires do in these situations — it crackled with the timing of a novelist who has thought very carefully about mood. Rowan set the card down on the table without releasing her hand. "I wasn't cheating," he said, much more quietly. "I know," she said. Neither of them was talking about cards. The storm showed no signs of stopping. This was beginning to feel less like weather and more like intervention.

★ Title: Disarmed

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 44)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

I am not a soft person. I want that established. I have been described, variously, as difficult, exacting, and on one memorable occasion by a former colleague, structurally opposed to joy. I consider these assessments fair and, largely, correct.

I do not know what to do with a person who laughs at my sharpest remarks like I've said something delightful. I do not know what to do with someone who leaves a coffee on my desk with a little note that says I noticed you skipped breakfast and doesn't make it a thing, doesn't wait for gratitude, just does it and disappears. I don't know what to do with any of it.

Today she brought me a plant. A small, extremely unremarkable succulent. "For your office," she said. "It's impossible to kill." "My office is fine," I said. "Your office has no living things in it," she said. I put the plant on my desk. She smiled like she'd won something. She had, and I was starting to think I'd let her on purpose, which is a problem I intend to examine in great detail once I figure out when I started losing on purpose. The plant, I have to admit, is not terrible.

★ Title: Permission

★ Voice Age: Adult (38 - 56)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

My daughter asked me if I was happy. She's twenty-three. She asked it the way young people ask things they've been working up to — carefully, like she was afraid of what I'd say. "I think so," I told her. "Is that because of him?" I didn't answer right away. "Partly," I said. She nodded slowly. "Good," she said. "I think Dad would say good."

I have thought about that conversation every day since. The particular grace of it. My daughter giving me something I didn't know I needed, which was permission — not from her, but delivered by her, from somewhere I couldn't quite bring myself to ask.

Daniel called that evening and asked if I wanted to get dinner and I said yes without the pause I'd been carrying for eight months. He noticed. "No hesitation," he said, and I could hear the smile in it. "No hesitation," I said. He was quiet for a moment, and then: "I'll make a reservation somewhere good." He did. It was. Some things, when the time is actually right, are astonishingly simple. I had forgotten that. I was very glad to be reminded.

★ Title: Heat

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 44)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

The kitchen was forty minutes from service and Chef Adaeze Obi had been working at the station next to Marco Vieri for three weeks, during which time she had concluded that he was the most technically gifted cook she'd ever despised. They did not speak except about food. About food, they were extraordinary together.

"Your acid is off," he said, tasting her sauce without asking. She took the spoon from him and tasted it herself. He was right, which made it worse. "Your plating is too studied," she said. "It looks like you're afraid of it." A pause. A fractional something in his face. Also right, she could tell. "We do this all day," he said. "Yes," she said. "Because it helps." He looked at her. She looked back. "Which would you enter if you could only pick one?" he said. "The competition or this?"

She didn't answer. She picked up her spoon and adjusted the acid and it was perfect on the second attempt. He watched her do it without speaking. After a while he turned back to his own station. But the question stayed in the kitchen like heat from the range — present, sourceless, impossible to locate and equally impossible to ignore.

★ Title: You in Real Life

★ Voice Age: Young Adult (22 - 36)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

Eight months of messages. Eight months of talking every single day, sometimes for hours, about everything and nothing and the specific texture of being alive that most people never say out loud. And then the train platform, and the coffee he said he'd be holding, and the jacket he'd described, and the moment when someone in that jacket turned around and was him, actually him, three-dimensional and real and slightly more nervous than I'd expected, which made me less nervous immediately.

"Hi," he said. Not the voice I knew from voice notes — lower, I think, in person. Better. "Hi," I said. We stood there for a moment in the gap between eight months of knowing someone and the strange new task of knowing them in space. "You're taller than I thought," I said. "You're exactly the same," he said. I couldn't tell if that was good. His face said it was good.

"I'm nervous," he said. "Me too." "That's insane," he said. "We know everything about each other." "We know everything about each other," I agreed. "And now we have to figure out the handshake situation." He laughed — that laugh I'd heard through phone speakers, now full and warm and filling the actual air between us. He held out his hand. I took it. "There," he said. "Sorted." We kept holding on.

★ Title: The Policy

★ Voice Age: Adult (30 - 48)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

We were the last two in the building. This was the third time this month. I was starting to think one of us was manufacturing reasons to stay late and I was not entirely certain it wasn't me.

She came to my office door at eight-fifteen with a report she could have emailed and we both knew it and neither of us said so. I took the report. Our hands were briefly adjacent. I put the report on my desk without looking at it. "Anything else?" I said. "No," she said. She didn't leave. I didn't tell her to. "This is inadvisable," I said. "I know," she said. "There's a policy." "I know the policy. I helped write it." She looked at me very directly. "Do you want me to go?" I looked at the report. I looked at her. I said the thing I should not have said: "No."

She stayed. We talked for an hour about the project, and then about things that had nothing to do with the project, and she laughed twice at things I said and both times I felt it land somewhere that the policy was quite specifically designed to protect. I am going to have to think very carefully about the policy.

★ Title: Cedar Falls

★ Voice Age: Adult (30 - 46)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Southern American

Script:

She'd come back for the estate and intended to leave in two weeks. That was the plan. The plan did not account for the fact that Cooper Hayes still lived three streets over and apparently still ran on the same early-morning route she'd mapped twelve years ago when they were seventeen and the future was theoretical.

He stopped when he saw her. She stopped because there was nowhere to go and the sidewalk was narrow and this town had always been too small for the things it held. "You're back," he said. "Temporarily," she said. A beat. His chest was still moving from the run. His face was doing something complicated that she recognised from a long time ago. "How long?" "Two weeks." "Right." He looked down the street. Back at her. "Your mama's house?" "My mama's house." Another pause. The oak trees did what oak trees do in October in cedar falls — turned insufferably beautiful, as if on instruction.

"I heard about her passing," he said, quietly. "I'm sorry I wasn't—" "It's okay." "It's not, but—" "Cooper." She said his name to stop him, and it worked, and then his name was just hanging there between them, used again after twelve years, and somehow that was the thing that made her eyes sting. "Thank you," she said, more softly. He nodded. He didn't pretend the moment was smaller than it was. That had always been one of his better qualities.

★ Title: On Paper

★ Voice Age: Adult (28 - 44)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Southern American

Script:

The agreement was clear. We had written it down, which was either very practical or deeply unromantic depending on your perspective, and we were both practical people, so. Separate lives, shared address, convincing enough in public. One year. Clean exit. Nobody gets hurt.

He made me coffee this morning without asking how I take it. He already knew. I don't know when he learned. He set it on my side of the table — our table, which is the kind of phrasing I need to stop using internally — and went back to reading, and I sat down and drank it and felt the specific unease of a person whose arrangement is developing inconvenient feelings about arrangements.

"You don't have to do that," I said. "Do what?" "The coffee. The—" I gestured vaguely at the domestic ease of the morning, the shared paper, the fact that his jacket was on the chair nearest my coat. "You don't have to make it real." He looked up. He looked at me in a way that took longer than necessary. "Okay," he said. He went back to his paper. He did not get up to move his jacket. I drank the coffee, which was exactly right, and said nothing else about it.

★ Title: The Long View

★ Voice Age: Adult (45 - 62)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

Twenty-two years. People ask what the secret is, and the honest answer is that I don't think there is one — or rather, the secret is that there isn't a secret, it's just the daily choosing, over and over, so many times it becomes indistinguishable from breathing.

I watch him make breakfast on Sunday mornings, which he does with the same careful attention he gives everything, and I think about the version of me who almost didn't say yes. Who almost let the fear of it outweigh the wanting. I think about her and feel an affection for her that is almost maternal — she was so close to missing this.

He looked up from the stove just then and caught me watching. "What?" he said. "Nothing." He gave me the look that means he knows I'm not saying something. "Just thinking," I said. "About?" I smiled. "The long view." He tilted his head. "Is it a good view?" I looked at him — this man I chose and keep choosing, this ordinary extraordinary fact of my life. "Yes," I said. "It's a very good view." He went back to the eggs. He was smiling. So was I.

★ Title: Don't Get On That Plane

★ Voice Age: Adult (26 - 42)

★ Language: English

★ Accent: Neutral American

Script:

I want to be very clear that I am aware of how this looks. I am in an airport, I am out of breath, I have been through two wrong terminals, and the security officer who stopped me when I ran is now escorting me to the gate because I explained the situation in more detail than was probably necessary and she has opinions about love that I did not anticipate but am grateful for.

The gate is boarding. I can see the back of her head in the queue. "Sasha." She turned slowly, like she was afraid of what she'd see. Her face when she saw me — I don't have a word for it. It did several things in quick succession. "You're here," she said. "You have a flight," I said. Eloquent. Extremely well-prepared speech. "I do," she said. "You should probably—" "Don't get on it."

She looked at me for a long moment. The queue moved. People around us did what people do when they sense something real happening — gave us space they didn't have to give. "Give me one reason," she said. "I'm in love with you," I said. "That's the reason. I know it's not a plan. I know we'd have to figure everything else out. But I'm in love with you and you're about to get on a plane and I couldn't let that happen without you knowing." She looked at her ticket. She looked at me. She stepped out of the queue. My heart did something structural. "You'd better have a car," she said. "I have a cab." "Close enough," she said. She took my hand. We walked away from the gate. I didn't look back. Neither did she.