“Wait,” she replied, wanting to take it slowly. She stood beside him, contemplating the stream. When she was little, she had promised herself that when she grew up she’d live outdoors. She took a deep breath and sat down on the bench. Michael remained standing. “You’re welcome to sit,” she said.

He sat beside her with a straight back. The sun was collapsing into the horizon. He told her about a poet who had once immortalized the stream, but he couldn’t remember the poem’s name.

“That’s not exactly a line to make a woman fall for you.”

“I’m supposed to make you fall for me?” he replied with utter seriousness.

She smiled, enjoying the fact that she couldn’t fracture his innocence. “That’s up to you.” It was cold, and they both started exhaling trails of white steam.

“Remember I told you about that time I stood in front of the mirror and pictured myself as an eighty-year-old?” he asked, and said that was the moment he realized his social network identity could free him. A “get-out-of-reality-free card,” he called it. A card that would enable him to do what he had never before thought possible: live the life he wanted to live, and at the same time, the life that was expected of him. He confessed that he had never been a video artist. After a month in Berlin he came home and had spent the past year here, in his room, in a tiny apartment with its back to the sea.

She listened to the note of excitement trilling through his voice, a note produced by someone divulging a big secret for the first time. She sidled up against him, placed her hand on his knee, felt it tremble.

“It’s cold,” she said.

Michael told her about his alternate biography. How he had chosen video art as a profession because it was a field no one around him knew anything about, and a town a three-hour’s drive from Berlin, so that no Israeli would think to come looking for him. He said he spent a week driving up and down Germany in a rental, taking thousands of photos with a chubby German girl who wasn’t even his girlfriend, but a failed actress he had hired for the shoot.

She told him that she had lied once too, when she posted a photo of her and a friend from the summit of Mount Kinneret, with a caption about having climbed their way up, when in reality they had taken the Subaru, which barely made it.

“Living on the edge, huh?” he said.

“’Cause moving to the burbs is really flirting with danger, right? You’re quite the daredevil,” she said, giving his ribs a gentle poke.