During that year, Leora had kept a framed picture of the two of them on her desk. In the picture, they were standing in the East Mountain Zoo, his arm draped around her neck and shoulder, a baseball cap on his head which cast a shadow over his face in the bright sunlight. They stood posed in front of the goat petting pen, and little goats were nosing their way between the bars around their knees, hoping for food. Jason had his mouth open slightly, and Leora knew it was because he had been shouting at the person taking the picture—a young woman, Leora remembered, a mother with a child walking beside her and a baby in a stroller, a woman with limp brown hair and bags under her eyes who seemed to be wandering through the zoo in a daze, answering the older child’s questions in a distracted voice and looking around one glance at a time, as if she were a refugee from another life, uncertain as to how she had ended up there, in the East Mountain Zoo. She had taken Jason’s camera with the same distracted air, ignoring the child tugging at her jacket, and he had shouted at her to move her finger away from the lens. It wasn’t a very good picture. Yet in the shadows between the bars of the petting pen, under the noses of the little goats, in Jason’s half-open mouth, and in her own squinting smile, Leora could sense an air of longing. It was as if the picture had been taken years ago, of people who had since grown old.

One night, a warm night that spring not long before graduation, Jason knocked on Leora’s door. When she let him in, he wore a pained expression on his face, under the yarmulke that seemed to be sliding toward the front of his head. Leora glanced at the picture on her desk, where Jason’s face was partly obscured by the shadow of the baseball cap. She could scarcely believe how different a person could look, through nothing more than a choice of hats. The people in the picture looked like strangers to her, a young couple she had barely met—just a boy and a girl grinning in a zoo, who had asked her to take their picture.

Jason didn’t bother to sit down. Instead he said, still standing in front of the door he had closed behind him, “I think we need to talk.”

Leora stood up, her knees trembling, trying her best to keep her voice cool. “Well, in that case, we can skip the rest of the conversation,” she told him, “because I’m twenty-one years old and I know that whenever someone says he ‘needs to talk,’ what he’s really saying is that he wants to end it. So let’s just say our goodbyes and get it over with, okay?”

Jason looked startled, but he didn’t know what to say other than to recite the script he had prepared for the evening. So he went on with the show. “I don’t want you to have any hurt feelings about this, or to feel bad about yourself or anything like that. I think you’re a wonderful person and I really do love you. It’s just that I realize that you are not the woman who is going to be my wife.”