Years later, when she became a professor, a student emailed her: “Do you have the Complex Analysis book by Ponnusamy PDF?”
Her qualifying exam was in six weeks. Her advisor had given her a reading list, and at the very top, underlined twice, was: Foundations of Complex Analysis by S. Ponnusamy.
Elias was the bookstore’s night clerk, a silver-haired man who wore cardigans and solved Cauchy-Riemann equations on napkins for fun. He noticed Mira hunched over her laptop, refreshing a broken link.