'some promise my idiot heart made itself'

"Look at her up there, offering herself like—"

"Who? Sobriety doesn't suit you. Good God." Marlon handed over his own drink. "It's delicious," he said.

Viktor looked down at it. "I don't drink."

"You don't?" Marlon thought through the past weeks, and took back his glass. "You mixed the vat last night. And you're always dropping things. You're the drunkest man I know."

"I've never touched the stuff. I couldn't dance."

"But when you were younger."

"I started training when I was eight." Viktor poked the fire with a long branch and said, "Tell me something. Tell me why I could walk down a street in the city and see two faces in the crowd. And one of them—a stranger—it might be a beautiful woman—for one of them I feel nothing, I remain intact. And the other, no more beautiful, no more spectacular: When I see her, I fall through the universe. And only because of our past, only because of some promise my idiot heart made itself years before."

"Why don't you try a drink."

"The truth is, there's no such thing as love. There's only history."

—Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House (2014)