As I left that bench, I wondered why becoming a woman had seemed so urgent then, when it felt so mundane now, as I realized that being a woman was less important to me than having experienced being a woman, that I’d grown much less precious about how people gendered me, even though I still felt alienated from the toxic parts of manhood. I returned to my hotel room to pick up my bags, then got on the T to South Station and the train that would take me home to Brooklyn, where my partner, Josh, and our dog, Ronnie, were awaiting my return. It had been an unexpectedly long time away, when I agreed to take a last-minute trip for work and had gone to LA right before coming to Harvard. I posted online about being on the West Coast, and Ralph texted me to see if I wanted to meet up; he had left MIT to teach at Oxford the same year I left for art school, but had returned to the States to be a professor at USC a few years before.

Englishmen might have a reputation for avoiding feelings and awkward interactions, but it was Ralph who’d kept up with me over the nearly two decades since our breakup. He was the one who asked to have brunch in 2005 when I moved to New York, who I saw a couple of times when I was at Cornell for grad school and he gave talks in the area. He got me used to keeping in touch despite the challenges of distance and ambivalent feelings, something I hadn’t been able to do with important people in my life up until then.

I’d seen his hair turn grayer over the years, the wrinkles around his kind eyes deepen, so those changes didn’t feel surprising when I saw him at a café in West Hollywood on a too-sunny day. I asked after his family like usual, his mother, Sandra, his sisters, Frances and Julia. I used to ask about his dating life but stopped a few years earlier because he never mentioned anyone special, and I didn’t want to think of him as lonely or unhappy. His father, Martin, had died a few years before, so he was now officially Sir Ralph Wedgwood, even though he refused to use the title. I grinned as I recalled that fleeting moment when I imagined myself a Lady, a fantasy I’d made my own and turned into real life.

He asked me how I was, and I felt words about to leave my mouth, my mind a split second too late to consider them.

“I just got engaged,” I said.