“You remember me from before I shipped out, don’t you? When I was with—” “Yes.” “Tell him about me then.” That touched me unexpectedly. If he wanted Nick to know about who he was before, when he still had a soul, when he was only an ambitious young man who loved someone he couldn’t have, well, that was romance, wasn’t it? I had seen little enough of it in my life that I smiled a bit wistfully at him.
