It began at a concert hall in October — one of those velvet-dark evenings when the air feels charged with something unnamed. Eliot was performing Dvořák, his cello speaking in the language he had spent his whole life learning. Cecile was in the third row, translating the program notes into French, her pen moving quickly across the margins of her copy.

After the performance, they found themselves at the same reception. He noticed her annotations — precise, luminous, quietly beautiful. She noticed the way he listened to everyone as if they were the only person in the room. They talked until the venue closed around them, until the lights were dimmed to suggestions, until there was nothing left to do but exchange numbers in the dark.

For the next year, their handwriting kept appearing in each other's margins — his in the scores she borrowed, hers in the poetry books he could not stop reading. On the first cold evening of the following October, exactly one year after Dvořák, he asked her to spend all his Octobers with him. She said yes in two languages.