She worked in event management at a think tank. A long day of shaking hands and saturnine chit-chat about the country’s total fertility rate had drawn to a close, and now she sat across from you at the little cafe on the square, zealously twirling the wooden umbrella in a chubby spritz glass. Faced contre jour, her warm Burgundian features, redolent of garden parties in Ixelles or on the Côte d’Opale, caught the shadow of the low-hanging sun as it glided over her wheat blonde hair, which fell gently from her head like idle thoughts on a summer day. She spoke a crisp Euro-English with an inquisitive, even accusatory inflection, as if to say that her inquiries had not yet fully concluded; that there would be more discourse, more tasteful banter, that nothing between you and her would ever be over (if indeed it had ever really begun) or brought to a satisfactory resolution. And she passed through the senses so intuitively — as if having always been there, just waiting for you to catch up — that it left the mind little work to do, freeing it to wander off beyond the firmament to higher realms, strange dimensions, other shores…