Page 128 of The Beautiful Ones

He was struck with the incongruity of it all, wondering how he had arrived at this precious moment. So securely she had nestled in his heart, it was impossible to map his trajectory.

“How did I ever find you?” he asked as he moved to her side.

“You didn’t. I found you. At the library of the De Villiers, at the party of the Haduiers, and that night I went to Boniface,” she said lightly.

He thought that truly it had been so, but that he had also been drifting toward her since the beginning, magnetized, a compass that had spun wildly and then gently settled upon a true north. Not love at first sight,because those fancies were best left for books and songs, but she had extended her hand and invited him to follow her into a dance, and he had found after a few steps that though he had never danced it before, he did not want to stop.

“Keep finding me, then,” he said.

One of her hands was resting on the windowsill and she was looking outside, her head tilted in the direction of the musicians who were still playing their merry tunes.

He knew that in the years to come, even when they were old and gray and their spines were bent by the weight of time, he would remember her as she was in that moment, with a couple of stray yellow flowers in her hair, her lips parted.

He stood still, holding the moment against his heart.

Then she turned her head and smiled at him.