Excerpt from The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Guess this is it, then." He stood outside his door. "It was a real pleasure spending time with you."

His face was appropriately tender and somber, but she could feel the wind in him kicking up, this urgency running through him that was the opposite of what was running through her, and knew without saying anything that her desire to entangle and to linger had no chance against his need to get the hell out of the hallway and back on his own again.

"Should we … exchange e-mail or something? Hey, you ever come to New York on business?" She tried to keep her voice light, but he looked at her sadly.

She bit her lip.

"All right, then," she said. She could do this. She did do this. He leaned down and kissed her, a dry husbandly kiss that still took away a tiny part of her.

* * *

She didn't know his last name. She realized that later. She hadn't needed to know, the limits of the thing being so clear that they hardly needed to be described. She'd wished, later, though, that she had it—not for the birth certificate, nor through any wish to reach out to him and complicate his life, but simply for the story itself, so that she could say to Noah someday, "One night I met this man, and it was the most beautiful night that ever was. And his name was—"

Jeff. Jeff Something.

But maybe she had wanted it that way. Maybe she had planned it that way. Because there was no finding Jeff Something from Houston, and it had only bound Noah to her more closely, made him even more hers.

Excerpted from The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin. Copyright © 2016 by Sharon Guskin. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.