Maybe it was in the way she held her chin, perhaps a millimeter higher, or in the crisp corners of her smile.
Maybe it was that her skirt swished instead of swooshed as she approached.
What I am trying to say is that I knew she knew, somehow.
Sometimes you can "read someone like a book." At least that’s how the expression goes. But a book would have been the wrong thing, because books can be hard, and wordy, and slow, and books require imagination and cognition.
So no. Sometimes you can know someone like the ending of a TV show you've already seen before but forgot you saw. Knowledge precedes comprehension, and you know what will happen next before you even know why.
But even that's not it. Because it would have to be more like you saw the same TV show every day for 5 years, and then when you came back from your internship in London to break up with your girlfriend, it seemed like that same old show for a second but then you knew it was a weird remake and the director got it all wrong.
"You needn’t have come all this way."
Whether they were actually her first words, that was the first thing she said when we met that afternoon in the baggage claim. Her voice was brisk, like a sunny winter day.
That night we made love for the last time. There wasn’t anger, exactly, but I was making anything but amends, and she was looking for something other than a reason to forgive me.