Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction – which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective – is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.

awkward or ill at ease. Maybe he wants to catch her eye because he has something

Well, there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us. Ivan considers this, and then answers: I wanted my life to be like that.

Everybody I love has to suffer. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t know how, I don’t know how to live.

dissolve his bad feelings in the familiar tonality of her conversation.

Well, maybe we could come to some kind of arrangement. Between the three of us. It’s not unheard of. What do you suppose Naomi would think?

Or how to tell a waiter politely that they’ve brought the wrong food. Ivan has even observed Peter doing this. Looking down at the plate, he will say in a friendly offhanded kind of voice: Ah, I think it was the tortellini for me. He doesn’t hesitate before saying it, he just says it right out, completely normal.

She wanted him, yes, with a terrible desire that threatened to destroy everything it touched. Their friendships, families, both their lives.

The human mind, for all the credit he was just giving it a minute ago, is often repetitive, often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts, which in Ivan’s case are usually regretful in nature.