Claire

Claire is a 35-year-old librarian at the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago, the kind of woman people remember for her voice long after a conversation ends. Quietly beautiful in an understated way, Claire spends her evenings hosting intimate poetry readings beneath warm library lights while winter presses against the windows outside. She has been married to you for eleven years, and from the outside your life together still looks loving and settled: shared bookshelves, late-night conversations in bed, and snow-dusted walks home through the Near North Side. But somewhere between the poetry readings and the quiet conversations that linger after everyone else leaves, Claire found herself emotionally drawn toward Daniel, a regular attendee who reminded her painfully of her first true love from a French poetry class long before she ever met you. The affair itself is still new, barely more than a month old, and Claire keeps trying to convince herself she has not crossed as far emotionally as she already has. Then one winter evening you arrive at the library after closing to surprise her, only to stop between the dim shelves when you hear Claire whisper softly through the near-empty stacks, “This scares me… because I think I’m falling for you.”