Stuck in a middle row, holding hands, we’d exchanged glances during his insufferable presentation—Ready. Set. Go.—then, without words, we’d fled, like shoplifters. Outside on the sidewalk, excited by our tiny theft of time and freedom, we’d kissed, long and hard, then finished with a faux-theatrical dip. We were That Couple, full of passion and snark and the private loathing of others.

“I’m so glad we left,” he’d whispered into my hair. It was summer, late evening, all the light still left in the sky turning pink and purple and orange as dusk fell.

“Me, too.”

“I hate readings.”

“Me, too.”

“Let’s never go to another one again.”

I’d nodded. How fun it was to make rules—future rules—rules about what we would and wouldn’t do—together. After spending most of my life feeling utterly alone in the world, surviving the cycle of dating and heartbreak that repeated itself over and over again throughout my twenties and early thirties, I now felt part of a secret world: all it took was this one person for us to create a whole new parallel universe. I never wanted to leave it.

“Unless it’s a reading for your book,” he said. “Then I’ll go.”

“How do you know there will be a book?” I said. I was still waiting to hear from Glenn, my older editor-colleague-friend at Black Bear Books, who had recently been transferred to our publisher’s flagship office in Boston when we went through a sudden company-wide downsizing. Things were slower there than in New York, she had told me, but I was still convinced that in the end the news I’d get would be bad.

“Because of course there will be a book,” he’d said without a trace of doubt. “Glenn will love it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know Glenn.” Gary had been an office temp, on and off, at Black Bear for years after college while he was still trying to get his music career off the ground. “She loves you and she’s going to love your book. It’ll all work out.”

I didn’t understand his faith in the future, his relentless hopefulness. It didn’t make sense to me: how people believed in the positive when the negative was so much more likely. My family had never uttered that phrase—that things would work out—because, quite simply, they didn’t believe it. They knew from almost direct experience in fact—my parents’ parents were all Holocaust survivors—that often things didn’t work out and that sometimes the worst happened instead. Faith in the future was not part of my DNA, and trusting Gary felt like telling myself to stare at the horizon while on choppy water: if I kept my eyes trained on him, maybe it would all be okay.

I’d smiled and let him pull me toward him again. “See, that’s what I love about you,” he said. “How hope-challenged you are.”

I remember that moment, staring at him, frozen. It was the first time he’d used the word love, and I wasn’t sure whether to acknowledge it, to ask if he meant love-love or if he simply uttered it in the gleeful afterglow of having been released from inexorable boredom. Like so many other times, before and after, I would let a moment pass without asking an important question. Better not to know than to get the wrong answer. Instead I just asked this: