I’m the last person to leave, taking my time to pack up my bag, to tack my heavy sheet of paper to the wall and to place the paints I borrowed back on the shelf. The overhead light is humming in the emptied room, and Pat comes over, having known me for over ten years by this point, and caresses my hand. She looks older since the last time I saw her, her hands blue with veins, her chin sagging, her hair wispier than I remember it.

“I’m so glad you came. Always good to see you, Sue. It looks like you needed it.” She turns away then, without waiting for a response, but I’m happy she acknowledged that I came. I shoulder my bag, staring at her retreating form. Even in her seventies, her posture is straight, her broad shoulders wide for the world to see. Right now, I want that kind of confidence.

Gavin is waiting for me at the 92nd Street Y lobby, even though we’d made no plan to hang out. But I know he saw something in me that Pat did, too, and in that moment I love him for it.

“You were at it today, girl,” he says, bumping me with his shoulder. “I tried to make eye contact with you for, like, five minutes, and you were so focused I had to stop trying.” I smile up at him, a beam of genuine kindness and light. And I wince because that’s how I felt about Anneliese, too, until this week. So maybe my judgment is off-kilter. Maybe I can’t trust myself.

We round the corner and both turn in to a small café without thinking, without asking the other, as if this was always the natural course of events. There are wine bottles stacked on the wall, and French pop is playing. The table is barely big enough for two plates, but we sit there anyway, and I struggle with how to cross my legs, how to contort my body so I don’t knock my knees against the table, don’t accidentally brush them against Gavin’s.

“Where’ve you been, stranger? I’ve missed you.” And he sounds so sincere, not one ounce of malice or judgment, that I feel pressure behind my eyelids, a swell of pain in my chest.

And in one great rush I tell him about Anneliese, about how I’d found another mother, how sweet and caring and kind she was to me. How I felt like she was family, my newly cultivated security blanket who never cared when I got her shoulder wet, who seemed to love me so innately that it was almost like we were related, that I had grown inside her.