But my mother believed that a respectable, well-brought-up girl kept her love in her heart and waited for the man to come and take her away with plenty of fuss and ceremony. So my feelings for that neighbor’s son never went beyond fantasy.

One night, at his sister’s birthday party, where I was also present, I saw him drunk and flirting with every girl there. Every image I had built of him collapsed. I was upset for a few days, and that was all. I didn’t just close his file; the love itself disappeared from my heart.

For all my craziness in other areas, I was extremely proud and rational when it came to love. Reyhaneh’s opinion was that I could never fall in love. But as far as I was concerned, I simply hadn’t met anyone I could fall in love with yet.

Like most girls, I had had suitors too. But either I didn’t like them, or they didn’t like me. My mother was thoroughly exasperated by the whole subject.

One of the men she desperately wanted as her son-in-law had a master’s degree in pure mathematics and worked for a company that took on technical and engineering projects. His mother called him “Engineer.”

I was twenty-five at the time, with my head full of dreams. I had only recently become independent.

Engineer was the son of one of my mother’s colleagues. Unlike my mother, who constantly praised him to me, his mother had told her son almost nothing about me except stories of my rebellious antics.

One day, when I had gone to pick up my mother from school, apparently he had also come to pick up his mother. After seeing me, he asked his mother about me. She told him I was a rebellious girl who didn’t listen to anyone.

I don’t know what he had seen in me, but he became curious. After some pursuit and detective work, he eventually found my address.

As he later told me, he had watched me for about forty days and concluded that I was exactly the woman he was looking for.

His mother, who had heard all about my stubborn escapades through my mother’s confidences, did not particularly like me. But out of respect for her son, she came to our house one day with Engineer so we could get to know each other.

The meetings continued for several more sessions.

According to him, this was the only time in his life he had listened to his heart. Since he was not the kind of person who ever did anything without logic, he considered this decision proof of love.

When he said that, I remembered the forty days during which he had been watching and evaluating me, and I couldn’t help laughing—though I swallowed the laugh.

During those meetings, I realized that very little of what he said interested me. He had a table for everything, and his brain was constantly analyzing numbers.

I couldn’t relax around him or talk freely about whatever was going through my head, because compared with his mathematical logic, my thoughts and beliefs seemed like pure madness.