After Hours is a romance column: sensual, non-explicit fiction for grown-up readers. All characters are invented adults; any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
A Friday story.
Nora Quill made indexes for a living, which meant that she read every book backward first. She was thirty-seven, she worked from a desk by the window of a third-floor walk-up on Eastern Parkway, and on Friday evenings, when the week’s pages had gone back to their publishers, she crossed Grand Army Plaza to the Central Library and sat in the same chair under the same tall window and read other people’s indexes for pleasure, the way some people do crosswords.
A good index, she liked to say to no one in particular, was a portrait of a mind. You could tell everything about an author from what they thought deserved a heading, and what they let slide into see also.
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