“You were the only one with a good answer. You said that when you were little, you realized not everyone wound up in the same heaven, because each person had a different notion of heaven. That as a child you imagined heaven as a big apartment building in which everyone had their own room where they realized their wildest fantasies.” She looked at him and remembered how she had imagined a man whose room was an island with coconuts, and a woman whose room was a whole city underwater.

“And then you said if that was what heaven was like, you want to be the woman who builds the rooms.”

Her heart started racing. “Strange that you’d remember,” she said.

He put his hand on her arm and stroked it with a gentleness she didn’t know he had in him. “I loved you even back then,” he said. “The rest was just for protocol.”

She didn’t think he’d be the first to confess. She drew his face to hers until their foreheads touched. She closed her eyes, and instantly knew the one thing she truly wanted. “We’ll go,” she said. “We’ll go to Berlin.”

This time it was he who hesitated. “Let’s wait a day or two, think it over,” he said, and admitted that since their last conversation he had begun to wonder whether he was in fact taking it all a step too far.

She wouldn’t let him back out. “You’ll have an entire week with me in Berlin to think it over,” she insisted.

An hour later they had already bought tickets and even booked the first night at a hotel. What few doubts he still had soon faded, and in the following days he didn’t stop talking about the trip, where they’d visit and in which restaurants they’d eat. She settled for a laconic email to her parents announcing she was extending her trip. She didn’t care about Berlin. Or about the vacation he went on and on about. She just wanted more time with him. She knew there were things between them that needed more time and closeness to grow. She just had to make sure they made it to Berlin in one piece.

One evening, while at the grocery store, she spotted from between the shelves a woman who had gone to college with them entering the shop with a stroller. She quickly pushed Michael’s head into a cucumber display. They kept perfectly still for a few good minutes, hiding between the tomatoes and sweet potatoes, looking at each other with that secret smile of theirs. Once the woman and her baby left the store, she sighed with relief, thinking that maybe it actually was possible to live an entire life like this.

12.