Chapter 21: What I Asked For

Ivo's POV

I did not make it to the door.

Hugh got there first, with his arm across the frame.

"Move," I said.

"No."

Behind him the hall had broken into noise.

Tansy was crying on the stage.

The director was calmly writing in a notebook while four donors talked at her at once.

"Let me past, Hugh."

"You want to tell her something?" My brother lowered his voice. "I'll save you the trouble. She already knows what you are."

"She knows what you are."

"She knows you picked her out of a file."

I said nothing.

It was true, and he knew it was true.

All I could do was stand there while the word *file* sat between us.

I had picked her out of a file.

Three years ago I read a new book by Lark Ellery on a train.

At the back was an author's note, and I do not think she expected anyone to read it.

*I wrote this one looking at a postcard of Seaview City I've never been allowed to visit.*

*It's the only ocean I own.*

*I wrote the first chapter in my old college library at Fairmont, the one with the green lamps.*

*Once, in that library, I told a stranger I was waiting for someone, and it wasn't true.*

*I think about him more than I should.*

I had read it standing in the aisle of a moving train.

*I think about him more than I should.*

I did not know for a month what to do with it.

I had known her name since that winter.

I looked it up in the student directory the same night, and I never used it.

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