Café Radiohead was always empty in the afternoons. Sometimes there was the odd solitary student mumbling feverishly over their attempt at an essay, or a few tourists seeking respite from the hot Riverside sun, fanning themselves with their dog-eared maps.

Charlotte liked the solitude, though, and made her way down every Monday and Thursday like clockwork, always arriving just after lunchtime. By then the lunch crowd would have fizzled out, and Sean would be wiping down the tables. "Sup?" he would say when he saw Charlotte, who would grin back and sit at her favourite table, the slightly cracked marble one behind the pillar.

Then, she would order her favourite drink, a triple white chocolate mocha, and Sean would always make sure there were three butter cookies on the side.

Then, looking around furtively, Charlotte would take out her favourite book of the moment - the titles varied, but the author rarely changed - and lose herself for the next few hours in a world she never wanted to leave.

This routine worked perfectly well with her part-time hours at the university, although Brownson had practically been begging her to come back as a full-time member of the faculty. The shorter hours suited her and gave her time to do more of what he wanted, which was to read, basically.

Being an English literature professor, one would have expected her to cling to the canonised classics such as Dickens, Austen and Steinbeck. But years and years of over-analysis and grinding the joy out of the English language – because surely, that was the purpose of academia – and Charlotte just ended up wanting something fun and brainless to read.

It had been pure coincidence, perhaps, that on the day of the accident, Charlotte had been preparing to fly home and she had stopped at the airport bookstore, wanting something dumb and written in the last 50 years to take her mind off the grief and the pain.

The cover of 'Judas' by one E.R. Torrington had caught her eye, and she had been debating whether to buy it when she heard the boarding call for her gate, so she quickly paid and ran off.

Maybe she had been expecting the book to be bad and trashy, and maybe she had been in a particularly vulnerable point in her life where her estranged mother had just died and she had been grappling with a strange, terrible mixture of grief, guilt and relief.

Whatever it was, Charlotte had been unexpectedly swept away, hijacked by the masterful language and gripping plot of two brothers, one of whom grows up to be a leading politician and the other a hitman, their lives culminating in an unexpected betrayal.

So Charlotte had gone to Amazon to stock up on E. R. Torrington's entire back catalogue. It had cost her a pretty penny and a lot of cursing from her overloaded mailman, but she had devoured the books – all fifteen of them – like a woman drowning of thirst in the desert.

Some had flaws, of course, and Charlotte didn't particularly care for 'The Last Hunter', a book also panned by most of the other fans on the official forum, but even in the worst book, the language was still lyrical, colourful, gripping.

Ever the academic, Charlotte dove into research about the elusive E. R. Torrington, who seemed to be a Salinger-like literary recluse. There were barely any interviews, and there were no pictures except for a blurry, hazy fan photo taken of the back of the man at a book expo.

One of Charlotte's fellow enthusiasts, HankMC1306, had dubbed the picture the Sasquatch photo, and the name had stuck. Charlotte looked at it more often than she would like to admit to, her eyes lingering over that nice backside in grey trousers before shaking her head at herself.

Indeed, Charlotte Randall, a specialist in 18th and 19th century English literature, was slightly obsessed with a mainstream author who had literally saved her sanity, and if anyone had anything derisive to say about E. R. Torrington, they were in for a hearty debate (and sometimes, argument, as her sister Clarisse unfortunately found out) with Charlotte.

So when the man in the turtleneck sat down opposite Charlotte at Café Radiohead and made a soft, derogatory snort when he spotted the cover of Charlotte's book, Charlotte understandably felt her hackles rise. "I'm sorry?"

The man in the turtleneck simply smiled, shaking his head. "Nothing."

Charlotte raised an eyebrow. "Oh, I do apologise. I thought you were making fun of my book."

"I was." The man's smirk deepened. "Why would you want to read that? Was Stephanie Meyers out of stock?"

Charlotte was so taken aback that she could only laugh. "You're serious?"

"Very much so." The smirk had now disappeared. "I'm not a fan of populist fiction."

"Populist?" Charlotte was intrigued enough to lay down her battered copy of 'Judas', the one with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon on the cover from the movie adaptation, because her first copy was far too precious to bring outside. "How is E. R. Torrington populist? The themes he has written about hardly have mass appeal."

"It's obvious in the language," Turtleneck said airily, stirring his cappuccino – and Charlotte's burgeoning irritation. "Sometimes I feel like he's writing to impress someone. And that's not good. You should have your own style, like the great masters."

Charlotte didn't know whether to laugh or not. It was like arguing with a version of herself from five years ago, at the height of her literary snobbery before the accident, and hence, the discovery of E. R. Torrington. "So what you're saying is that anyone published in the last 50 years has no literary merit."

"Not at all." Turtleneck sipped his cappuccino. His accent sat oddly in Charlotte's ears, the consonants particularly hard-hitting. "There are plenty of good living authors today. Sadly, E. R. Torrington is not one of them."

Charlotte shook her head, pinching the bridge of her nose and aching to get back online where he could complain to HankMC1306 about this impertinent fellow. "Fine, then we'll have to agree to disagree, my friend."

"Fine." Turtleneck nodded at her rather amusedly before taking out his laptop and setting it up. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

They fell silent for the rest of the hour, Turtleneck's fingers clattering on the keyboard and irritating Charlotte even more, and finally Charlotte folded her book and called for the bill, not bothering to explain to a puzzled Sean why she was leaving earlier than usual.

Turtleneck's smirk followed her out of the café.