Maybe she’d misheard him. Maybe he was one of those people who thought women’s lives were incomplete without having a child, and—having assumed she was much younger—had said, You’d be a good mother.

But his tone, that insistence, had suggested he’d known she was lying. And also suffering.

Kiki had once said something about how Sarah’s face invited projection. During one of their first late-night talks, Kiki had declared—in her intimate way, initially so destabilizing—“People must assume they know you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“No signifiers. You could be from so many different worlds.”

Sarah had laughed, even as she felt judged. “Are you saying I’m—what? Generic? A blank slate? Neutral?”

“I just bet you’re familiar to different kinds of people.”

Sarah remembered feeling unusually comfortable in that moment with Kiki. It was true. People did often think they knew her. And she’d never thought to question why.

This was probably why the Czech man had started speaking to her on the subway. Or he understood she was vulnerable and was somehow trying to con her. He had singled her out, flattered her, and it had worked. She’d told him—a complete stranger—that she was leaving town for the weekend; then she’d written down her home address. Sarah reflexively checked that her wallet was in her bag. She opened her wallet to make sure all the money and cards were there.

She jogged up the station steps, sat on a park bench in the oncoming dusk, and typed St. Ivo, Brooklyn, into her phone. She scrolled through Yelp reviews, blog mentions; was she searching for proof that he’d been telling the truth? Verifying that this bar had food service? That someone with a Czech father worked there? And who was St. Ivo? She found, through the oracle of Google, that he was the patron saint of lawyers and a sometime symbol for justice. St. Ivo was also the patron saint of abandoned children.

The cloudless sky thrummed with pearly light, and a text came in from Matthew—How was seeing Caroline? Where are you?

Where was she?

She went over the lunch and the subway ride, unwittingly weaving together two sets of images and phrases, until she forced herself to think of anything else, and a group of kids—maybe eight years old—popped into her head. They took Wilderness Skills classes in Prospect Park and she often saw them here, dismissed around this time. The kids were so cute and also easy to mock: Wilderness Skills in Brooklyn! But it wasn’t too difficult to imagine how, when autumn came and when the park’s entrance became a dark mouth blowing bitter air, the idea of knowing how to use a compass would seem pretty shrewd.

She imagined a son—a boy named Alex—his expression as she approached. He was lanky and freckled, with a mop of dark hair; big feet, dazzling smile. Even though she always picked him up from the park, his face lit up every time.