“We’re tied. Because you won, too.”

“What did I win?”

We are out on the street now, on University Place, and it is cold and dark and quiet. For a few seconds, the only footprints on the sidewalk are ours. He looks up at the sky, takes my hand, and kisses it. “This.”

Within a month we will practically be living together at my place, a block away from the bowling alley. I will have no regrets. He’ll be nothing but loving, and kind, and honest—dependable and present in ways no previous boyfriend has been before.

When I call to tell Glenn the news, she laughs through the phone. “I am so happy to be wrong!”

* * *

But she is not wrong. He has his first panic attack on what seems like a perfect Sunday afternoon. We’ve seen Harold and Maude at the Cinema Village on Twelfth Street and afterward walk a few blocks down to a diner for an early dinner. It is late December. Dusk had fallen while were inside the theater and Christmas tree lights twinkle in almost every window. I slip my arm inside Gary’s and lean into him. Despite the gloaming, the movie has left me in an unfamiliar state of being: squishy and warm; full of love and hope; open to possibility. If Maude, a Holocaust survivor, can embrace life, then I can embrace it, too.

My life is already improving. Though Glenn doesn’t live in New York anymore, we still talk and email daily. I’m finishing a first draft of Bird and hoping to show it to her soon. And after years of living alone in between failed relationships, enviously staring at couples walking around the Village on the weekends, I am finally one of them. I gaze up at Gary in his dark blue peacoat with his big shoulders and his giant green eyes and am just about to tell him how happy I am, how great this is—how being with him on the street in my neighborhood after a movie feels like a tiny miracle—when he suddenly stops moving.

“I can’t go in there.”

I think he’s kidding. We’re standing right in front of the door of the restaurant—people are rushing around us to get inside where the windows are steamed with heat. But when he steps away from the door, disengages from my arm, and looks up and down the street, his eyes are wild. He is terrified. I feel like I’m with a stranger.

“If you make me go in there, I’ll die.”

“I’m not going to make you do anything.” The street telescopes, goes quiet. He looks like a cornered animal. I stand perfectly still, trying not to make any sudden moves.

He tells me he’s serious. He’s not kidding. That he can’t take it anymore.

I have no idea what he’s talking about, what’s happening, what the “it” is. I wonder for a split second if I should call someone, someone who deals with this kind of thing, but I don’t know who deals with this kind of thing because I don’t know what this thing is.