Chapter 2 THE STRANGER WITH FITZGERALD'S BOOK

Cora's POV

He is still looking at me.

Not in the way Tyler used to look at me, checking his phone mid-sentence, half-present, like I was background noise he had learned to tune out. This man is looking at me like I am the only thing in the room worth paying attention to. Like I just said, something that landed somewhere real inside him, and he is deciding what to do with it.

It is the most uncomfortable I have felt all day.

And I cried in a library bathroom for six minutes this morning, so that is really saying something.

"You read it recently?" he asks. His voice is low. Unhurried.

"Three times," I say. "Once in high school, because I had to. Once in my sophomore year, I thought I had missed something. Once last month, because I was hoping I was wrong about him."

"Were you?"

"No." I turn my wine glass in a slow circle. "Gatsby didn't love Daisy. He loved the version of himself that existed when she looked at him. The moment she became a real person with real problems, he was done." I pause. "Most men are like that."

Something moves across his face. No offense. More like recognition.

"That's a specific kind of hurt to carry into a bar at noon," he says quietly.

My hand stops on the wine glass.

I did not tell him it was noon. I did not tell him why I was here. I did not tell him anything except a literary opinion about a dead author, and somehow he just reached right past all of it and touched the actual thing.

I should shut this down. I should pick up my glass and turn away and let this be a weird two-minute exchange with a stranger.

Instead, I say: "My boyfriend of eight months was asleep on my couch this morning with my best friend's cardigan under his head."

He does not gasp. He does not say oh no or I'm sorry or any of the things that would make me feel managed. He just looks at me steadily and says, "This morning."

"Six forty-seven a.m."

"And you came here."

"My friend brought me. She's outside." I glance toward the door. Demi is still on the phone, pacing the sidewalk, gesturing the way she does when her mother says something she disagrees with. "She'll be a while."

He nods. Then he picks up his book, finds his page, and goes back to reading.

I stare at him.

He is not pushing. Not performing sympathy. Not trying to fill the silence with himself. He is just there. Solid. Like a person who is genuinely comfortable with quiet.

I have not met many people like that.

"Does it get better?" I ask. I don't know why. The wine, maybe. The morning. The way he looked at me was like I was worth the real question.

He looks up again. Thinks about it honestly, which I can tell because he doesn't answer right away.

"The part where you feel like an idiot for not seeing it," he finally says, "goes away first. The part where you miss the routine takes longer. The actual person," he pauses. "You'll be surprised how fast that fades when you realize you were holding on to who you needed them to be."

I look at him for a long moment.

"That is either the wisest thing anyone has said to me today," I say, "or the wine is doing a lot of work."

He almost smiles again. It does something to his face, softens the careful, quiet steadiness of it into something warmer. "Probably both."

I laugh. Actual laugh, not polite laugh. It comes out before I can stop it, and it surprises both of us.

"Cora," I say, and hold out my hand.

He takes it. His grip is warm and firm, and he holds it exactly one second longer than a handshake needs to last. "Nolan."

Just that. Just Nolan.

We talked for two hours.

Not about Tyler. Not about the cardigan or the couch or the six-minute bathroom cry. We talk about books, the ones that changed us, the ones that lied to us, the ones we reread when everything else feels uncertain. He has opinions. Real ones, not the kind people perform to seem interesting. He argues that the most honest love story in American literature is Of Mice and Men, and I tell him that it is genuinely disturbing, and he says, "Exactly, that's why it's honest," and I cannot find a single thing wrong with that logic.

He asks questions the way people do when they actually want the answers. Not what you study, but why you choose it. Not where are you from, but what do you miss about it? Small difference. Enormous difference.

At some point, Demi comes back in. She stops at the table, looks at Nolan, looks at me, looks at Nolan again, and says, "I'm going to go use the restroom." She disappears for fifteen minutes.

I do not notice.

When she finally comes back for real and taps my shoulder, I look at my phone, and it is nearly 3 p.m. I have been in this bar for three hours. I have not thought about Tyler once in the last two.

I stand up. Nolan stands too, because apparently he is the kind of man who does that, and I feel something flutter low in my stomach and immediately tell it to stop.

"Thank you," I say. "For the conversation."

"Thank you for the Fitzgerald," he says.

I smile. He smiles back, the full version this time, not the almost. It is unfair how good it looks on him.

Demi pulls me toward the door. I go. I don't look back.

Outside, she grabs my arm and whisper-yells: "Cora. Who was that man?"

"Nobody," I say. "Just someone at the bar."

She stares at me. "You were glowing."

"I was not glowing."

"You were literally"

"Demi."

She holds up both hands. "Okay. Nobody. Sure." But she is smiling in that specific way she smiles when she knows something I am not ready to admit yet.

I tell myself it does not matter. I tell myself it was one afternoon, two hours, a little wine, a broken morning, and a stranger who asked the right questions. I tell myself I do not even know his last name.

I tell myself all of that the whole walk home.

If I found his last name three days later.

It is written on a whiteboard at the front of my Literary Theory classroom.

Underneath it, in small neat letters: the course. The semester. The office hours.

And Nolan, my nobody, my stranger, the man whose hands I noticed before his face, is standing at the front of the room in a jacket and glasses, looking directly at me with an expression so carefully blank it tells me everything.

He knew.

He knew before I sat down.

He let me walk in anyway.