“It’s closed,” Beth said quietly. “There’s a new one downstairs. This is going to be office space, I think, for the Web people.”

She looked down the hall, nervously, and drew back her hand.

“Perfect,” Lincoln said. He stepped into the break room and held the door open for her. She looked up at him, surprised, and followed. The door swished shut behind them, and Lincoln stopped for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the Pepsi machine light. There was a clear space against the wall, next to the Coffee-Mat. Beth followed him there—he kept expecting her not to—and they sank to the floor, facing each other.

He wanted to touch her, to take her hand again, but she pulled her skirt down over her knees and pressed her fists into her lap. He hadn’t noticed what she was wearing before. A knee-length denim skirt, a rose-colored cardigan, periwinkle tights, and tall blue leather boots. She looked like a sunset, he thought.

“So now we talk?” she asked.

“I think so,” Lincoln said.

Beth looked at her fists. “I can’t think of anything to say to you that you don’t already know.”

“Don’t say that,” he said, “It’s not like that.”

“It isn’t?” She looked angry.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t apologize,” she said, her voice breaking. “Please. I really, really don’t want you to be sorry.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” she said.

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say something, I don’t know what, but something that will make it perfectly explicable for me to be here.” She was talking quickly, quavering, he thought she might even be starting to cry. “I mean, Jennifer’s already going to go into labor when I tell her about this. She still thinks we should turn you in—but turn you in for what? And to who? She’s accused me of being swayed by your vast cuteness …your cute vastness …”

“Jennifer’s pregnant?” Lincoln asked, smiling out of context.

Beth wiped her eyes with her sweater and looked up at him.

“Yeah.”

“That’s great,” he said genuinely. “That’s really great.”

“Yeah … ,” she said, still staring at him, then hid her face her hands. “Oh my God, this is so weird.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Stop. ”

“Right, sorry, look, would it help if I told you that I never meant to start reading your messages? Or Jennifer’s or anybody’s? I was just checking the filter, and you’d get flagged, you know, for breaking the rules, and those are the only messages I ever read, only the flagged messages, and only yours. I mean, maybe this makes it worse, but I wasn’t regularly reading anybody else’s mail. I didn’t have to leave notes on anyone else’s desk when I quit.”

“Why did you have to leave a note on mine? I swear that note’s the weirdest part.”

“I wanted to apologize,” he said, resisting the urge to look away.

“But why apologize? Why did it matter?”

“Because you mattered,” he said. “I wanted to come clean with you.”

“Anonymously?”

Lincoln didn’t want to say he was sorry again, so he didn’t say anything at all.

“I kept thinking about you,” Beth said. “I kept thinking about how this would work in a book or the movies. If this were a Jane Austen novel, it wouldn’t be so bad—if you were intercepting my letters, and I was peeking over your garden hedge …Computers make everything worse.”

“I made everything worse,” he said. “I shouldn’t have written you that note. I mean, on top of everything else. I’m sorry it upset you.”

“That’s the thing … ,” she said, “I’m not even sure that it did upset me. Maybe at first, thinking about some strange guy reading my e-mail. But it didn’t take me long to figure out it was you. I wasn’t seeing you around the building anymore. And I mentioned it to Derek one day—you know Derek, who sits next to me—‘Whatever happened to that big guy with the brown hair who used to eat dinner with Doris?’ And he was like, ‘The IT guy? He quit.’ And then it all came together. That you were …you.”

Beth had stopped crying and relaxed against the wall. Her skirt had crept back up over purple- stockinged knees. Lincoln wanted to fall into her lap. They were still sitting sideways, facing each other, and she set her hand just next to his on the floor, so that their fingertips were almost touching.

“How would this work in a movie?” she asked, looking at their hands, looking softer by the syllable.

“How would Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks make this situation less strange?”

“You mean, like in Sleepless in Seattle?” he asked.

“Right,” she said, “or You’ve Got Mail . I mean, first of all, we’d have this conversation off camera.

It’s too messy.”

“If this were a Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks movie,” Lincoln said, “I’d just kiss you, probably in the middle of a sentence. That would fix everything.”

She smiled. Had he ever seen her smile like that? With her whole freckled face?

“Cue Louis Armstrong,” she said.

“But I’m not going to kiss you,” he said. He had to force the words out.

“You’re not?”

“No. Because you’re right. This should be explicable. We should be. I want you to be able to look back on tonight, and believe that this is plausible, that this is how two people could find each other.”

“Ah,” Beth said. “When Harry Met Sally.” If she smiled any wider, she’d break him.

“Joe Versus the Volcano,” he said.

“Jerry Maguire,” she said.

“The Empire Strikes Back.”

She laughed. It was better than he could have imagined. Like a giggle falling off its chair. “I wouldn’t have done what I did in the theater, if …Well, I asked Doris about you.”

“Yeah?”

“And she said you were one of the nicest guys she’d ever met, maybe even nicer than her husband, Pete …”

“Paul.”

“Paul,” Beth said. “And that you shared your dinner with her and helped her move. She also told me that you were single—that the girls on the copy desk flirted with you, but that you were a perfect gentleman. She said you quit your job because reading people’s e-mail made you feel like a Peeping Tom, and that working nights made you feel like Count Chocula.”

“She told you all that?”

“Right here. Over three nights of pinochle.”

“You should’ve stayed in reporting.”

“See?” she whispered, closing her eyes, for just a moment. “There. What can I say for myself that you don’t already know? What can I say, knowing what you know?”

“It isn’t like that,” he said again.

“Everything I wrote about you, what I called you …”

“I knew you weren’t serious,” he said, “I knew you had a boyfriend.”

“Is that why you read my e-mail? Because I had a crush on you?”

“No, by the time you wrote that, I already felt …everything.”

“ I was serious,” she said. “More than I ever would have admitted to Jennifer. I followed you whenever I could. I tried to follow you home once.”

“I know,” he said faintly.

She looked down. Pulled down her skirt.

“I just had this feeling about you,” she said. “Is that foolish?”

“I hope not.”

They were quiet.

“So, okay,” Beth said, picking her face up and leaning forward, sharply, like she’d decided something. “When I was in the eighth grade, I saw part of a music video by the Sundays, this song —‘Here’s Where the Story Ends.’ Do you know that song?”

He nodded. She pushed her hair behind her ears.

“I almost never got to watch MTV, only when I was at my friend Nickie’s house and only when her parents weren’t home. But I saw this video, not even the whole thing, and I just knew that it was going to be my favorite song for …for the rest of my life. And it still is. It’s still my favorite song …

“Lincoln, I said you were cute because I didn’t know how to say—because I didn’t think I was allowed to say—anything else. But every time I saw you, I felt like I did the first time I heard that song.”

She was throwing stars at him. It was hard to listen. It was hard to look at her. He still felt like he was stealing something.

“Lincoln?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“Do you believe in love at first sight?”

He made himself look at her face, at her wide-open eyes and earnest forehead. At her unbearably sweet mouth.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you believe in love before that?”

Her breath caught in her throat like a sore hiccup.

And then it was too much to keep trying not to kiss her.

She came readily into his arms. Lincoln leaned against the coffee machine and pulled her onto him completely. There it was again, that impossible-to-describe kiss. This is how 2001 should have ended, he thought. This is infinity.

The first time Beth pulled away, he pulled her back.

The second time, he bit her lip.

Then her neck.

Then the collar of her shirt.

“I don’t know … ,” she said, sitting up in his lap, laying her cheek on the top his head. “I don’t know what you meant by love before love at first sight.”

Lincoln pushed his face into her shoulder and tried to think of a good way to answer.

“Just that …I knew how I felt about you before I ever saw you,” he said, “when I still thought I might never see you …”

She held his head in her hands and tilted it back, so she could see his face.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. Which made him laugh.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“No, I mean it,” Beth said. “Men fall in love with their eyes.” He closed his. “That’s practically science,” she said.

“Maybe,” Lincoln said. Her fingers felt so good in his hair. “But I couldn’t see you, so …”

“So, what did you see?”

“Just …the sort of girl who would write the sort of things that you wrote.”

“What things?”

Lincoln opened his eyes. Beth was studying his face. She looked skeptical—maybe about more than just the last thing he said. This was important, he realized.

“Everything,” he said, sitting straighter, keeping hold of her waist. “Everything you wrote about your work, about your boyfriend …The way you comforted Jennifer and made her laugh, through the baby and after. I pictured a girl who could be that kind, and that kind of funny. I pictured a girl who was that alive …”

She looked guarded. Lincoln couldn’t tell from her eyes whether he was pushing her away or winning her over.

“A girl who never got tired of her favorite movies,” he said softly. “Who saved dresses like ticket stubs. Who could get high on the weather …

“I pictured a girl who made every moment, everything she touched, and everyone around her feel lighter and sweeter.

“I pictured you,” he said. “I just didn’t know what you looked like.

“And then, when I did know what you looked like, you looked like the girl who was all those things.

You looked like the girl I loved.”

Beth’s fingers trembled in his hair, and her forehead dropped against his. A heavy, wet tear fell onto Lincoln’s lips, and he licked it. He pulled her close, as close as he could. Like he didn’t care for the moment whether she could breathe. Like there were two of them and only one parachute.

“Beth,” he barely said, pressing his face against hers until their lashes brushed, pressing his hand into the small of her back. “I don’t think I can explain it. I don’t think I can make it make any more sense. But I’ll keep trying. If you want me to.”

She almost shook her head. “No,” she said, “no more explaining. Or apologizing. I don’t think it matters anymore how we ended up here. I just …I want to stay …I want …”

He kissed her then.

There.

In the middle of the sentence.

CHAPTER 89

“I DON’T THINK your mom liked me,” Beth said. They were on the way back to his apartment and she was balancing a giant pan of leftover lasagna on her lap.

“I think she loved you,” he said. “That’s why she looked so miserable. She would have been much happier if there was something obviously wrong with you. You should have seen her face when you said you were voting for Ralph Nader.”

“I did. She looked pissed.”

“Because she loves Ralph Nader.”

“Why did your sister laugh?”

“Because she loves to see my mom thwarted.”

Beth shook her head. It was raining outside, and her hair was wet and curling around her forehead.

“That’s crazy,” she said.

“Now you’re getting it,” he said.

They’d decided not to tell his mom or Eve—or anyone—exactly how they’d met. They told them they’d met at work. (“Which is true,” Beth said. “Technically.”) Only Christine knew the whole truth —well, and Jennifer, of course, and probably Mitch. Beth said they could tell whomever they wanted after they’d been together long enough for it to seem like a bizarre footnote to their relationship. And not the whole freaky story.