I thought I had left him in that candlelit room, but Lukas was not the kind of man who accepted silence as an answer. He pursued me with a gentleness that was itself a form of persistence, soft and relentless as the tide wearing down a stone. He began appearing at the café where I took my morning coffee, at the bookshop where I still sometimes wandered out of habit, at the little park near the university where I sat to sketch the bridge. Each time, his face would light up with a hope that made my chest ache in a way I did not understand. It was not desire. It was something else, something tender and bruising, a longing that had nothing to do with the body and everything to do with the heart.