Past the neighborhood food co-op there’s a block that gets exceptionally good for signs, for letters. A creamy script on the maroon awning of an Italian restaurant. Across the way, cream again, but this one for a laundromat, bold and plain against a dark green backdrop trimmed in yellow, the letters stacked vertically, efficiently, exactly how you’d want your laundry to be folded. A favorite: the jumbled cacophony of the multiple signs for a local, longstanding bike shop—some Gothic printing on the sign for the building, a decorative serif for the bright red sign hanging over the street. That one, it looks hand-painted, as does the window lettering—white, trimmed in blue—over the front door. We’ve been here a long time, these signs say. It doesn’t matter if we match.

I keep walking, head up, and I feel as if I’m counting, noticing signs I’ve never looked at before, and that’s saying something. It soothes me in the same way it did back then, when I learned the city by walking it, by paying attention. I learned neighborhoods letter by letter, sign by sign. It’s how I got inspired; it’s how I fell in love with the city but also how I learned to make it here. It’s how I taught myself that I could be someone other than the sheltered, suburban girl from the perfect-on-the-surface family. It’s what I sketched late at night on the subway, stinking of food and dead tired, distracting myself from thoughts of my parents and also my chances of getting mugged—signs and letters I’d seen, new ideas that rattled loudly in my head like the tracks beneath my feet. It’s what convinced me to take the first commission I ever got offered, twenty-five birthday party invitations for my catering manager’s son’s eighth birthday party.

It’s what convinced me to go out on my own, to start the business that turned Meg Mackworth into The Planner of Park Slope.

There are signs, I’m thinking, to the invisible Reid who won’t get out of my head. You just don’t know how to read them.

I’m a few blocks from the shop when the idea hits me. I can’t seem to do anything about Sibby, about the path she’s going down that’ll take her even further away from me, but I can do something about myself, about the way I’ve been feeling lonely and blocked, restless with the need to say too much in the jobs I’m doing, reluctant to even attempt a start on the job that could change everything for me.

Maybe I can remember that every single letter I draw is a sign. No reckless, inappropriate codes necessary.