He lent it to me over a decade ago. Then he moved cities, we did that slow thing where two people just quietly stop texting, and that was that. But I still have his copy of the novel. His name's right there in pencil on the first page, a little faded now.
I've read it four times since. It's genuinely become one of my favorites — which somehow makes the whole thing worse, because it should be his shelf it keeps coming back to, not mine.
Every so often I open our old chat, see the last message from years ago, and think about typing something. "Hey, I still have your book, this is embarrassing." Reconnecting over it. Easy hook, honestly.
I never send it. Eleven years of never sending it. At some point the not-sending became its own thing, heavier than the book ever was.