He tried to shake the thought off, but it clung to him like cigarette smoke. It was a fruitless endeavor, the nimbus of hope that surrounded him when he thought of  her , the one woman he’d realized (all too late, of course) would have completed him in every way. The woman he’d spent his childhood trying to tear down. First forbidden, then an enemy, now a dream that sometimes caught him unawares, leaving him melancholy for days on end. He forced his attention back on his friends. 