At seven o’clock, I went into the restaurant and got a table for two. I tried to read the menu, but my thoughts kept cycling back to Steph. Tasha would call me obsessed. She was arriving on Wednesday, and I hadn’t decided yet whether I would tell her about Steph. The question was paralyzing.

Steph texted to say she was stuck in traffic. I went back to thinking about what I should say to her. I’d imagined a dozen different ways to spin what had happened: It was a mistake; I didn’t mean it; I’m sorry; I regret it. But none of them were true, because I didn’t think it was a mistake and I didn’t regret it. Steph had been the first new person I met here, and then we’d run into each other again at Safeway as if it were fated. That’s what I wanted our relationship to be: fated.

I’d been seated at the table for more than ten minutes—painfully aware that I was alone because the waitress kept stopping by to refill my water glass—when Steph came through the front door. She saw me right away, which wasn’t particularly extraordinary since the restaurant was small and mostly empty, but it still gave me a thrill to meet her gaze across the room. She looked nervous, too.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, sitting down across from me.

“It’s okay.” I wondered what she had told Lisa about her plans tonight.

When the waitress came over, Steph ordered pad Thai with shrimp. I ordered the next item on the menu, pad see ew with beef. We made small talk while we waited for the food. Paintings of Buddhas and lotuses hung on the walls, and a group of elderly Fairfax hippies was seated nearby. The restaurant was so brightly lit that it felt wrong to talk about what had happened between us in Talia’s dark room.

When the food came, we ended up splitting our dishes. Steph fumbled with her chopsticks. “Sorry, I’m a chopstick amateur,” she said.

“Stick with me long enough and you’ll learn,” I joked, and then my face burned. I was such a fraud. Not only an Asian fraud, but a lesbian fraud, too. I had no idea what I was doing. I felt as if my whole body had just turned into a swarm of bees, and I had to concentrate on taking one bite after another so I could hold myself together.

Beef. Rice noodles. Carrots. Tasteless.

Slowly, I came back to myself. I drank some ice water. My chair was slightly unstable beneath my body; one of the legs was shorter than the others. Steph was eating with her eyes lowered to her plate, avoiding my gaze.