It was time. I was nervous. I crossed back over, I entered the building, my palms were clammy, I told the doorman I was looking for 3C.

“Yes, miss, you have an appointment?”

“Yes.”

He picked up the phone—”Young lady here to see you”—then nodded at me. “The elevator to the right, miss.”

In the elevator, I put my hands in my pockets, pulling my jacket taut around the back of my neck. I felt myself shivering from fear or excitement and clenched my jaw to steady it. I was fiddling with something in my pocket, and when I registered what I was doing, I nearly laughed from surprise. The napkin.

It was still there. Which meant—what? Did it mean he was real? I could take it out and see: Were the words he’d written etched there, or weren’t they? And what if they weren’t? Would I ever accept this? There was no way. Either they were there or they had been rubbed off by my hands.

Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Come back. If they weren’t there, I would be devastated. Would I ever recover? I wasn’t sure that I would. But if I didn’t look now, the torment wouldn’t cease; I would wonder, every second until I looked, what I would find.

The elevator opened. There was still time: five minutes. Outside her office, I screwed my eyes closed. I took the napkin out of my pocket and felt for the corner, ripping off a tiny piece, then put it in my mouth, letting it disintegrate. I’m here. The next bit I chewed and swallowed. The next bit I rolled around my teeth, letting it massage my gums. The next bit went down like a vitamin. And then the next, and the next, and the next. If you eat me up, there will be nothing left. And yet I had found a way. He was still here. He was inside me, he was part of me, I would never let go, or perhaps I had, perhaps this was my only way of releasing him.

I went inside. There was a small waiting room with two offices abutting it. It looked a bit like my parents’ own office waiting room: a couch, a few chairs, an end table with fanned-out magazines, a watercooler.

Just as I sank into one of the hard-backed chairs, scanning the selection of highbrow magazines on the end table, her door opened. “Come in,” said her floating head.