On the coffee table in the living room sat a beat-up British paperback edition ofRound the Bend, a book that in spite of also being about flying Liam liked very much, possibly because the narrator was a mechanic and a good one and worked very hard to see that the planes he worked on never broke in the air. Liam was convinced that every plane he was on was going to break in the air.

In the bedroom there wereEthan Frome, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, andPersuasion, from evidence of bookmarks being read simultaneously.

Liam read a lot, too, mostly history and poetry, but he’d never had books stacked back to back all going at once the way Wy did. He was pretty sure she had kept every book she’d ever read, too; there were bookcases in every room of the house including the bathroom, all flavors, essays by Carl Sagan, historical romances by Thomas B. Costain, the entire Oz collection.

He’d found her weeping one day the previous week, huddled over a much-thumbed copy of a mystery, one of a series. In this one the heroine’s lover had died. She took it as a personal affront-“I can’t believe she did that! How could she do that?”-and threw the book across the room, only to retrieve it a moment later and force him to listen to her read the death scene out loud. He was amazed at how involved she became in the story, and a little amused, but he was afraid that if he made some smart remark the next time she’d throw the book at him, so he kept his mouth shut.

It was something else to know about her, something they hadn’t gotten around to sharing in that brief time they had had together three years before, something he could add to his growing store of information. He wanted to know everything about her, every single thing, from the way her toes curled when he bit the sole of her foot to the way she played air mandolin with John Hiatt, to the way she mothered Tim, the adopted son in the room down the hall.