We met on a Tuesday in February, in the back room of a bookshop on Atlantic Avenue that has since closed. Emma was there for a reading she had no intention of staying for; Oliver was there because it was raining and he had left his umbrella on the train. He asked what she was reading. She said Proust. It was not Proust.

Seven years, two apartments and one opinionated cat later, he asked again — on the same street, in the same kind of rain — and this time she told him the truth, and said yes.