Adnan loved precisely the song none of Lana's friends knew. He too had once wanted a flat overlooking a railway station. He even claimed the best cherries came in crumpled paper, eaten before reaching home. Lana recounted these coincidences to a friend with the embarrassment of a grown woman afraid of sounding like a little girl. After a long, weary divorce, meeting someone she did not have to translate herself for felt good.
One evening they stood outside a closed cinema. Adnan told her that a missed performance was merely an exit disguised as a wall. Lana did not laugh. She had written that sentence seven years earlier, after the conversation in which she first seriously considered divorce. It had never been published. She had not said it to him. It was in a black notebook packed away at her sister's while she changed flats.
Her sister had been Adnan's flatmate before introducing them. When Lana asked where the boxes had stood, her sister said they had been in the sitting room for a while. She sensed something unpleasant in the question and offered to come over. Lana declined. That evening she wanted to hear only the man who already knew too many of her answers.
He admitted opening one notebook. Then two more. At first out of curiosity, later because he liked the woman who had written them. When they met, he wanted her to feel the same. He insisted he had not lied about how much he liked her. Lana asked where the story about his cherries had come from. He lowered his eyes. She did not even have to ask about the railway station.
What hurt most was that she could no longer recall a conversation without searching for a stolen piece. Perhaps she would have loved him without his knowing the song. Perhaps explaining why a station meant arrivals to her, rather than noise, would have been interesting. He had taken away their chance to get to know each other, then called that shortcut closeness. She asked him not to come again. Whether he considered that excessive no longer mattered.
She brought the notebooks home in two canvas bags. For a long time she did not open them. One rainy afternoon she finally found the sentence and crossed it out with a single line. Underneath she wrote what had actually happened outside the closed cinema. Adnan's name fitted into the first line. The rest of the page belonged to her.