The highlighter cap was on the table. Not lost - she could see it, two inches from her coffee mug, a small yellow cylinder she'd set down without deciding to. Her thumb had already turned the page.
She read the paragraph again and her lips moved a little, shaping something like *the author suggests*, a phrase for no one - addressed to a classroom that had graduated without her. The coffee had a film on it. She read it a fourth time and caught herself counting the sentences, the old reflex, the way you check a door you already know you locked. The chip on the mug had a brown stain in it now, tea from some other morning, and she touched it with her thumbnail without looking up.
Renata's bottle had left a ring on the hardcover someone brought as a prop and nobody opened. The woman on the loveseat - Diane never caught her name - had her shoes off - one foot tucked under her, and she said she'd wanted to shake him, the villain, actually shake him by his fictional lapels, and laughed at herself for wanting it. Renata laughed too and poured without being asked. Diane's pen was in her purse.
The clock on the microwave said 1:47 and she was on page 131 and her sandwich was still in its plastic triangle - the bread gone a little soft against the film. She turned back to find where she'd started and couldn't, exactly - somewhere around the part with the station platform, she thought, or before it, and her thumb moved along the bottom edge of the pages trying to feel the number 112. The highlighter was under her keys in the front pocket of her bag - cap still on, and when she finally touched it she just pushed it aside to find a pen, then didn't use the pen either, and set her sandwich wrapper on top of everything and went back inside.
The last page was warm from her knee and she smoothed it anyway, a small useless press of her palm. The bathroom tile had a grout line she'd been meaning to regrout for two years - and she sat with the spine loose in her hand and looked at it. She hadn't underlined a single thing. She closed the book and the sound it made was just a book closing.
The paperback sat spine-up on the counter for three days before she turned it over. The back cover had a photograph of the author looking sideways, and Diane read the two-sentence biography twice, the way you read a menu at a restaurant you're already leaving. The highlighter was where she'd left it, cap off, and when she pressed the tip to her thumbnail nothing came - just a faint colorless drag across the skin. She put the book in her bag with her keys on top of it and her keys on top of that.
