Excited, for four: We’d made plans. We were going to play again, and in some ways, we’ve been playing since. We send photos back and forth to each other, mine mostly of local business signs and Reid’s mostly of faded advertisements from the sides of buildings, the kind of relics we’d looked for on our first walk together. We don’t even say much in the messages—sometimes we add an address, or a note about which letter is our favorite—yet they feel full of the promise of our next meeting.

But by the time Saturday comes, I feel exactly one thing.

My period.

I should’ve known, and not only because The Planner of Park Slope obviously has a very specific method by which she tracks her cycle—an extremely genius tiny red dot next to the expected date in my monthly log. I should’ve known because I woke up on Friday morning in the kind of mood that swings wildly between “ten seconds from murdering someone” and “three seconds from crying because you noticed a layer of dust on your windowsill, you absolute filthy pig.” Lucky for the world at large I did not have to leave the apartment all day, but unlucky for me there was a marathon of House Hunters on, during which I listlessly made my way through a few regular client jobs while fantasizing about murdering every single house hunter who complained about paint colors. Then I cried about the per-square-foot cost of housing in Missouri (it’s really very affordable!).

At one point I’d rallied, trying again to finish the sketches I’d been working on since Tuesday night, when my phone had honked with the obnoxious horn sound I’ve assigned to my dad’s text messages, which come in pretty rarely. I’d swiped it open and there’d been a photo of him, tanned and smiling, shaking the hand of some man in a suit with a flag pin on the lapel, a framed certificate between them. Behind my dad was Jennifer, the woman he married two weeks after he and my mom officially divorced, which was also, as it turned out, barely three months after I’d left home.

was my dad’s caption, bland and informative, and I’d felt a spike of old, awful anger. I’d opened my notebook and swept my hand through a single word, adding a few dramatic swashes for decoration, and snapped a photo to send back to him.

it read, beautiful and celebratory, but four of the letters there—L-I-A-R—fell minutely beneath the baseline, so minutely that only I would notice.

And then I’d thought: Reid would notice.

I’d felt so bad to have done it, so petty and small, that I’d almost, almost texted him to cancel, my fingers hovering over the keypad on my phone.