It began in 1922. I was twenty-two years old, working as a clerk in a small bookstore on West 47th Street in Manhattan. The book was called "The Waste Land," and it was new, and everyone was talking about it, and I did not understand a word of it, but I bought it anyway, because I wanted to understand.

That was the week Tom came in.

He was tall, with dark hair and grey eyes and a mouth that looked like it had forgotten how to smile. He was wearing a coat that had been fashionable three years ago and was now just sad, and he had the look of a man who had lost something and did not know how to find it.

"Do you need a book?" I asked him. This was my standard greeting. I said it to everyone.

"I do not read."

"Then do you need coffee?"

This was not my standard greeting. I do not know why I said it. Perhaps because his eyes were the colour of rain, and I wanted to tell him that I understood about rain.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "Yes."

His name was Tom Kowalski. He was a dart player—professional, he said, though he said it with a shrug, as if it were something he had been and was no longer. He told me he had been accused of cheating in a tournament, and he had lost everything, and he did not know what to do with himself.

"I do not judge," I said.

"I do not judge either," he said. "That is the problem."

He came to the bookstore every day after that. Sometimes he bought a book. Sometimes he just stood in the aisle and looked at the spines. Sometimes he sat on the bench by the window and watched the people walk by on 47th Street. I would bring him coffee, and we would talk, and he would tell me stories about darts and tournaments and the men he had played against, and I would listen, and I would think: this man is broken, but he is beautifully broken.

For three months, this was our life. He came to the bookstore. I brought him coffee. We talked. He told me he was from Chicago. I told him I had been born in Brooklyn and had not left New York except for one trip to Philadelphia when I was sixteen. He told me he wanted to travel. I told him I wanted to stay.

Then the war came, and he enlisted, and he left, and I stood in front of the bookstore and watched him walk away, and I did not cry, because I was not the kind of woman who cried in public.

But I cried that night.

The letters started coming in November. Tom wrote from basic training in Georgia, and his handwriting was shaky because he was writing by candlelight, and he told me about the other soldiers, about the food, about the way the instructor yelled at them every morning.

At the end of every letter, he wrote the same words: "跨越三个世纪，Ellie, I am thinking of you."

I did not understand the words. Three centuries. It was a phrase he had read in a book, I thought. A romantic phrase. I smiled when I read it, and I wrote back.

The letters continued. Sometimes weekly. Sometimes monthly. Tom wrote from the Pacific, from the beaches of Normandy, from a forest in Belgium where it had rained for forty days and he had not seen the sun. He wrote about the men he had killed and the men he had saved, about the things he had seen and the things he had not wanted to see.

And in every letter, at the end, he wrote: "跨越三个世纪，Ellie, I am thinking of you."

I kept every letter. I kept them in a box under my bed, in the apartment above the bookstore, and sometimes, at night, I took them out and read them, and sometimes I just held them and smelled the paper and the ink and the cigarette smoke that had gotten into them during the writing.

The war ended in 1945. Tom did not come back.

I waited. I waited for a week, then a month, then a year. I used my savings to buy the bookstore from the owner, who was retiring, and I became Eleanor Voss, bookseller. I changed the sign outside. I kept the bench by the window. I poured coffee for customers who did not ask for it.

I continued to receive letters from Tom. Sometimes they were his. Sometimes they were late replies to letters I had sent years ago, arriving when I had stopped expecting them.

In 1950, when I was forty-eight years old, I heard that a man who looked like Tom had been seen in San Francisco. I sent him a letter. He replied, but it was not Tom. It was a man named Thomas Kowalski, who had been a soldier in the war, who had never thrown a dart in his life, who had never been to my bookstore.

In 1955, when I was fifty-three, I heard that a man who looked like Tom had been seen in Los Angeles. I sent him a letter. He replied, but it was not Tom.

In 1960, when I was fifty-eight, I stopped sending letters. Not because I had stopped hoping, but because I had stopped believing that hoping was useful.

In 1972, when I was seventy, I received a letter from Tom. He had recovered some of his memory. He had remembered the bookstore, the rain, the coffee, me. He had tried to find me, but I had not moved—the bookstore was still there, the sign still said "Eleanor Voss," the bench was still by the window. But he had been ill. He had been in a hospital in Illinois for two years. He had recovered, partially. He could talk, he could walk, he could throw a dart. But some things he could not remember, and some things he could not do, and coming to New York was not one of them.

"跨越三千个纪元，Ellie," he wrote, "I am thinking of you. I am sorry it took me so long to remember. I am sorry I did not come sooner. I hope you are well. I hope you are happy. I hope you found someone who can give you what I could not."

I read the letter. Then I put it in the box with the others. Then I closed the box. Then I put the box back under my bed.

I am eighty now. My eyes are not what they were. My hands shake when I pour coffee. The young people who come into the bookstore do not talk the way they used to. They look at screens instead of spines. They do not sit on the bench by the window. They do not ask for coffee.

But I am still here. The bookstore is still here. The bench is still by the window.

And sometimes, when it rains, I stand in front of the store and watch the water run down the street, and I think of Tom, and I think of the three months we had, and I think of the fifty years I spent waiting, and I think of the letters in the box under my bed, and I think of the words he wrote at the end of every one of them: "跨越三个世纪，Ellie, I am thinking of you."

I do not regret it. I truly do not. I only wish him well. I hope he is happy. I hope he found someone who can give him what I could not.

She found the person she was looking for. He waited for the person he was waiting for. But the person she was looking for was aging, and the person he was waiting for had already died. Only the empty bookstore remained, and a pile of burned paper.