Sophie stops picking at her cuticles and we lock eyes. Before we formally made the decision to launch the shop, we sat down together, each with a sheet ripped from her designer’s sketchpad and a marker. She said we should map out our ideal next ten years so we could both be on the same page about our goals and values, especially if we were tying our finances and livelihoods to each other for the foreseeable future. She completed a detailed outline in under two minutes: marrying Liv that next summer, one kid by their second wedding anniversary, and another within the next two years; she wanted a brownstone in Park Slope with a yard for a Labrador to run around in; she had even noted how much money she needed to set aside every month to maintain regular appointments with her colorist. I pointed out that the shop wasn’t even mentioned in her outline.

“Well, obviously, it’s a goal,” she had said back then, rolling her eyes. She scrawled it in with her marker. “Such an obvious goal I didn’t even need to write it down.”

Here we are, three years later: she has one company, one wife, no kids, no dog, no yard. She has a half floor in a brownstone, but not even close to the whole thing. Her colorist still does a great job.

Sophie had leaned over my sheet to see what I had written and balked. I had written the name of our company ten times over in slightly different looping cursives, like an eighth-grade girl trying out her first name with her crush’s last in the margins of her notebook. It’s not that I never wanted anything besides this business. It’s just that I wanted it so badly that the outer fringes of my life turned hazy. Maybe I wanted a relationship, but I couldn’t tell you with whom, or what it’d look like. On Sunday mornings, would we run together in McCarren Park or would we call each other “babe” while passing pages of the New York Times back and forth? Would we move to an old walk-up with a leaky faucet but plenty of charm or one of those sterile high-rises going up on the waterfront with a lap pool and a sauna? Would we even want a baby?

Sophie’s always wanted a baby. This company is mine. We’ve both known that for years.

“Email Roy,” Sophie says finally. “It’s worth a shot.”

I type up the email and press send right in front of her, before she can change her mind.