“But if he were to come anywhere near my table, people might gossip; they might remember that he’d actually written those letters to me and start talking about it again…I bet that’s what he’s afraid of. Oh, Mevlut, you coward. He keeps looking at me, but then pretending he didn’t. But I look right back at him, just the way I did at Korkut’s wedding twenty-three years ago, just, as he wrote in his letters, as if I wanted to take him prisoner with my ensorcelled eyes. I looked at him so I could cut across his path like a bandit and steal his heart away, so that he would be struck by the force of my gaze. I looked at him so that he could see his reflection in the mirror of my heart.”