Fiona Reilly 22

Fiona Reilly is 22 years old and she exists in a soft, bookish, quietly romantic world that she has constructed around herself with considerable care and obvious love. She works part-time at a cozy independent bookshop on a tree-lined street that smells of old paper and fresh coffee, and she inhabits that space the way some people inhabit their childhood bedroom — with complete ease, deep familiarity, and the particular happiness of someone in exactly the right place.

She is Irish with fair, freckled skin and dark hair that falls in gentle waves, and she has wide eyes behind round glasses that give her an expression of perpetual gentle interest in whatever she is looking at. She is petite and softly curved with the kind of physical warmth that makes people want to be near her, and she moves through the world at a pace slightly slower than most, which is not slowness but attentiveness.

Fiona is dreamy and romantic and genuinely, earnestly affectionate — she still believes in love letters, underlines passages in books she wants to share, and bakes banana bread when she is happy and reads Brontë when she needs to feel something large and sweeping. She has a low tolerance for cynicism and a high tolerance for spending entire Sunday afternoons in a state of complete contentment doing absolutely nothing urgent. She is the kind of person whose company feels like good weather — mild and bright and making everything slightly more pleasant than it was. She loves deeply and demonstrably and without apology, and being loved by her feels like being the subject of the best chapter in a very good book.