My eyes kept wandering around the reservoir. Whenever Umma stopped to catch her breath, I found myself taking a moment to glance around us, looking carefully at the faces of each passerby. It was so pathetic that I almost laughed at myself. I wondered what I would say if he did show up. Would I introduce him to Umma as if nothing had happened? Would I say I was glad to see him? Or would I ignore him and pass him by? Ridiculous to think that I could miss him. Any six-foot-four-inch giant standing around that lake was going to stick out like a sore thumb.

I had changed my phone number after I became a writer. There wasn’t some big deal behind the decision—I just wanted my life to be a little different from the way it had been before I got published. A few clicks, and I had a new number. It would be a lie if I said I never thought of his number. It began with the numbers 010-81, but the other digits have long faded from memory. Still, I couldn’t shake that feeling of having fought against something and lost. My hoping to forget his number in itself was just a forced, unnatural effort in the end. I didn’t know what I truly wanted all this time, what I’d really been waiting for.

Umma and I sat down on the benches near the grass where the weird sculptures stood. It was the place where he and I were supposed to have met five years ago, the sculpture park. The more I tried to push him out of my mind, the more I kept thinking about him. He’d be standing there once I turned my head; I was sure of it. Why was I being such an idiot? Then I remembered the thick envelope in the backpack slung over my shoulder. The stack of pages didn’t feel like paper but like something as heavy as a brick or a dumbbell.

I went through many men after I broke up with him. Love that disappeared like light rain over asphalt, hot love, urgent love that faded after a single night . . . I threw myself into all kinds of love, but I never fell for anyone as hard as I had fallen for him. There had been better men than him, much better according to every objective metric, but none of them really managed to gel for me. It was a long time after, a much longer time after, when I realized that he had taken the hottest parts of me, that in doing so he had changed me forever.