He carefully tucks it inside the inner pocket of his suit jacket, giving it a single, serious pat, as though he’s really planning to watch one of those videos, and I feel my face flush in pleasure.

But sometime around the sixth sign, things start to take a turn for the worse. Two in a row, we can’t find—either because I’ve got something wrong from my searching or because they’re covered up. The next is too faded to see. After that, my dressmaker sign, the one with so much potential—I don’t know if I’ve written the address wrong, but nothing from the image I saw online looks familiar around the address I’ve written down. I check the map again, zoom in on various satellite views; I ask Reid to try a different app while I’m looking. I feel pressured, embarrassed, and it’s Reid who has to suggest we move on.

And on top of that, the sidewalks seem to grow steadily more crowded. Our strategy of staying out of the way now seems more difficult to master. Reid’s already always-stiff demeanor stiffens; he looks tense and impatient—I hate New York—and I’m flustered, too. I see signs that aren’t on my list, wonder if I should stop, then struggle to refocus. The sky has turned grayer than it was when I arrived, as gray as the buildings that seem to loom on all sides, and this seems to make the signs harder to discern.

Around Sixth and 36th, there’s a sign I caught sight of on a blog, but when we get close, my heart sinks—the parts I can see are faded, and there’s construction scaffolding everywhere, obscuring the view. The noise is unreal—grinding, metallic, miserable. Reid and I have to shout at each other to suggest angles at which we might see better; at one point, misunderstanding each other completely, we turn in the exact opposite direction from each other, and I have to reach out to tug on his sleeve so that he follows me under a scaffold sidewalk to get closer to the sign. Through the brief length of it, the noise from the construction seems even louder, inside-your-bones loud, and the space is warm with the body heat of everyone passing through it. I look up at Reid when we emerge, see his jaw work, as though he’d been clenching his teeth the whole way through.

“We’ll just try and see this one.” I’m already opening the camera app on my phone.

“You still can’t see it. Maybe two of the letters.”