My spirits always lifted the instant my car started. Abandoning the grocery store pretense, I backed out of the driveway and headed in the familiar direction of my ex-boyfriend's house, driving the same direction I'd driven the previous three, eight, or perhaps thirty-eight nights. Passing through familiar neighborhoods: ferocious Highland Park, sleepy SMU, earnest M Streets, stopping for lights, I played the protagonist careening toward destiny, Anna Karenina rushing to Vronsky, or Marianne seeking Willoughby. One soulful connecting glance and Martin would confess he'd missed me. We would share his blue denim sofa like the old days, Martin watching ESPN, me reading a novel. But Martin didn't expect me anymore; I was no longer a part of his life.

At the red light a mile from his house I opened the book on my passenger seat: Jane Austen's Unfinished Novels and Juvenilia. Having read all six novels, I now trolled her minor works desperate for the sort of Jane Austen fix a book like Sense and Sensibility offered. But instead of reading a few sentences at the red light, I studied the postcard doubling as a bookmark: a postcard promoting a summer literary festival in England where people enact Jane Austen's novels. Vera, owner of my favorite indie bookstore, gave me the postcard the day I bought Mansfield Park, saying, "I think you're ready for this."