“Franny for a girl, Johnny for a boy,” he would say.

“Dugald for a boy, Morag for a girl,” she would say.

They could go on like this for hours.

You’re too young, said her parents.

It’s too soon, said her friends.

How do you know if he’s the one, she asked herself.

Let’s get married, he said.

“You could have found an easier way to meet me,” he would say to her, as they lay in their single bed, watching the tree outside the window fill with birds and empty, again and again.

She had been riding her bike down Main Street, daydreaming, thinking of a blue dress she had seen in a shop window and how she might look in it and where she might go in it, and she had suddenly looked up and seen him crossing the street right in front of her. It shouldn’t have been too late to stop, but something went wrong with her reflexes and instead she drove the bike straight into the curb and went flying over the handlebars.

“If life were a novel I would have just twisted an ankle,” she said. “You would have had to put your arm around my narrow, corseted waist to support me as we hobbled back to the manse. Perhaps I would have fainted and you would have had to gather me in your manly embrace.”