“My ex-wife…” He closed his eyes, leaning back in his chair. He actually looked like he was going to be sick, and Maya was concerned, but she didn't know what to do, what to say. When he opened his eyes again, and he saw her looking at him, he offered her a small smile. He wasn't her professor anymore in that moment-he was the man she had talked to yesterday standing by the duck pond.

“I need to get out of here.” He stood and grabbed his suit coat off the back of his chair. “Do you want to come?” She stared at him. “I know a place we can talk.”

She didn't know why, but she said the first thing that came into her head. “Okay.”

He stood, leaning over to open the door, and she followed him out of his office to his car.

“You can call me James.” He ordered them Heineken's at the bar and Maya helped him carry them to a spot by the window.

“I won't be twenty-one for another six months,” Maya said in a low voice as they sat down in two small booth seats, facing each other across the table.

He smiled. “Live dangerously.” He tipped his beer, clinking the bottleneck with hers before drinking half of it in one long, continuous swallow.

“So is it true?” Maya sipped at her beer. They had been quiet on the drive over. She didn't quite know what to say.

He frowned out the window. “I have to know something.” His eyes skipped back to her and then out the window again. “Who do you intend to tell?”

Maya opened her mouth to reply and then closed it again, watching him tip his beer up, the sun glinting off the dark green glass. He had never looked so human to her before, the lines around his eyes a little deeper, his mouth drawn down, instead of pulled into his usual lopsided, sarcastic smile.

“So it is true,” she breathed, lifting her beer and taking another drink. Her English professor, the winner of not one, but two, O. Henry Awards, as well as a National Book Award for his one and only novel, “The Unsung,” (or so everyone had believed)-he was one of America's best-selling romance writers of all time?