For a few minutes, we eat in silence, and maybe that wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s not silence at all. The line’s still out the door and there’re people on either side of us, the pair beside me punctuating their conversation with boisterous laughter. Outside the window, a dump truck rumbles by, releasing puffs of dark smoke into the air behind it, all the pedestrians in its wake ducking their faces as they walk. I feel oddly, uncomfortably responsible—I want to say, Do better, New York, so that Reid doesn’t get that look on his face from last time. That tense, I’m-barely-tolerating-this look. I think about his letter to me, all the times he wrote the word noise in his tidy half-script.

This city’s noise is all caps, all the time. Written with a big, chisel-tip, permanent black marker. Impossible to ignore.

“Hey,” he says, surprising me. “Look over there.” He’s gesturing out the window, not to where the dump-truck smoke lingers, but across the way, to a somewhat run-down-looking bar catty-corner to where we sit. “That’s hand-lettered, isn’t it?”

It is. The awning is black vinyl, and that’s obviously been screen-printed, but below the molding that separates the building’s brick upper floors from the bar beneath, there’s a length of faded black paint, not far off in color from the chalk paint I’ll use in Lark’s kitchen. Painted across it is the bar’s name in an inexpert serif, uneven beaks on the S, the foot of the T slanting upward. The letters are filled in a dark marigold, traced out with a brick red that picks up the color from the building above. I feel the nudge of an idea—this rich, unexpected color scheme and that elegant script from the photo Reid sent me.

“Good eye,” I say, reaching for my phone to snap a photo. I could wait until we’re outside again, but this has the echo of one of those rare moments, the ones that sometimes come when I’m in the thick of a project—when my mind is so busy that I’ve got to sleep with my sketchpad by my bed in case I wake up in the night inspired. I haven’t had that kind of moment in a long time.

When I set down the phone, I think I might wriggle on the stool. “Thank you,” I say, picking up my fork again.

Reid clears his throat. “Have you ever heard of John Horton Conway?”

I’ve got a mouth full of falafel so I can’t really answer. I shake my head and hope that John Horton Conway is not a Founding Father or any other historical person I should definitely know about but can’t remember because this food is so good.

“He’s a mathematician.”

“Like you,” I say, or sort of mumble around the falafel.