“And with that recitation, Adelaide Buchwald gave Jack Cavallero her heart. Impulsively, gloriously, openly, she gave it to him, falling in love with someone she did not know, wondering at the curve of his cheek, and the wave of his hair, and the way his shirt draped over his shoulders. He made her laugh. He dared to write poems. He risked looking foolish in order to create something beautiful or strange. She wanted to know the story of the scar on his abdomen. How had he gotten that wound? How well had it healed? She could see by looking at him that he had been vulnerable. That he had lived. Survived. She wanted to see all his scars, see all of him, and she felt suddenly, intensely certain that he was a safe person to show her own scars to. She thought, Maybe we have known each other always. Maybe our hearts encountered each other somehow, like two hundred years ago at a cotillion, with him in a frock coat and me in whatever, some kind of elegant and complicated dress. Or maybe our encounter was in another possible world. That is, in one of the countless other versions of this universe, the worlds running parallel to this one, we are already in love.”