He grimaced, apparently finding the idea offensive. “Hell no,” he protested. “You have to know how far you can stretch a lie. For instance, the photo with your parents isn’t that great.”

“Why?” she asked, insulted. He told her he had researched her Facebook user habits and concluded she wasn’t the kind of person who posted selfies.

“I find it a little troubling that you’d know that,” she said. “That’s nothing,” he said. “Nowadays you have algorithms that can determine whether a person has cancer or is about to divorce his wife just by his expression in a photo.”

Michael said that if anything, it would have been much more like her to post the Leonard Cohen song without the photo, but reassured her it was a mistake that wouldn’t actually raise any suspicions. He suggested she wait two days and post a photo of a tourist site with a funny status, like she had done during her trip to Athens, and that toward the end of the week she upload that German DJ’s remix of the Asaf Avidan song. She couldn’t bare how painfully accurate he was, or see the point of living in a world in which her every breath was so predictable.

She took a shower and called her father to let him know everything was okay. Michael thought it might not be such a good idea, and suggested she settle for a text message, but she made it clear it wasn’t up for negotiation. She also knew there was no need to worry, because her parents never took much of an interest; the most she could expect of them was a perfunctory question like whether her hotel offered breakfast.

Her father’s voice soothed her. She thought he’d probably feel sad if he discovered she’d been close by this entire time.

Afterward, Michael took her to the café that served as his office, a five-minute walk from his apartment. He told her he sat there with his laptop a few hours every day, doing the books for a Canadian online gambling company that operated via a Gibraltar-based server. When he first moved to Hadera, he promised himself he wouldn’t go near accounting, but after his savings ran out he decided four hours a day was a sacrifice he could live with.

“I know it’s not as romantic as a video artist in Germany,” he said, “but I realized that—”

“Then where are you actually?”

“What?”

“Where are you really?” she asked, resting her hand on the table.

“What do you mean? I’m here.”

“Yeah, now. But sometimes you’re in Germany. And when you’re working, you’re in Canada or Gibraltar,” she said, struggling to put her thoughts into words.

“I’m not the only digital nomad, you know.”