While at Stanford, Austin met Ian and brought him home for Thanksgiving dinner. That was how Ian and I met, way back when. I was long over Max by then and started dating Ian, who made me laugh and shared my love of books and art and Monty Python movies. Our relationship got serious for a minute or so when Ian proposed marriage, but it didn’t take long for us to realize we weren’t meant for each other. Happily, we’d remained close friends and book-world colleagues.

Ian had recently proven correct my decision to end our engagement by coming out of the closet. But that was a whole other story.

I walked around the table and over to the window. “You know about Guru Bob and how he first got Abraham to hire me as an apprentice, right?”

“Of course. You were just a kid, right?” Ian said.

“Right. So back then, it was-”

“Wait a minute,” Ian interjected. “Do I need to hear the entire history of the world or can you skip to the good parts?”

“I promise I’ll keep it as short as I can. So, anyway, Guru Bob did the same thing for Max, asking Abraham to mentor him.”

“I thought Max worked with paper.”

“He did.” I gave Ian the abbreviated history. Max had been helping out Abraham Karastovsky at the same time I was working as his official apprentice. My little heart would go pitter-patter whenever Max came into the studio. I would dream of him and me bookbinding our way to our very own happily-ever-after.

Sadly, though, Max didn’t care much for bookbinding; he was always more interested in the paper itself than in the binding procedures. So instead of helping with binding books, he began to experiment with all sorts of different papermaking techniques.

“It was all good, because Max’s talent with paper fit right in with Guru Bob’s master plan for Dharma,” I said. “Guru Bob wanted to revive as many of the ancient guild crafts as possible, thinking that our finely crafted products would provide income for the fellowship to stay afloat into the future.”