After our meal we make our way to the Emporium to outfit Kat’s new room with proper toys and décor for a little girl.

On the ten-minute walk to the Emporium—a multilevel department store that carries everything—I see more of the city’s bustling retail area. I take note of a shoe repair shop, a milliner, a stationer’s, a grocer, a bakery, and a hair salon.

The outside of the immense Emporium is as large as many of the buildings I’d grown used to seeing in New York, taking up nearly a whole city block on Market Street. We take an elevator to the fourth level and walk past displays of sporting goods and bicycles to the children’s toy section. The display cases are laden with dolls and doll carriages, miniature tea sets, train sets, boxes of colored wax crayons, and paints. There are dollhouses and little wooden barns with carved farm animals and books and puzzles and looms and jointed stuffed bears and armies of toy soldiers.

Kat is drinking in the sight of all those shelves, I can see that, but she makes no move to walk toward any of them. Martin just waits for her to do so. I reach for her hand and lead her to a doll carriage upholstered in robin’s-egg blue fabric, with chrome and rubber wheels and a collapsible hood trimmed in wide white lace.

“How about if we try out this carriage with your own dolly,” I say, convincing Kat to lay down the doll with the cracked cheek inside the satin-lined bed of the miniature buggy. A glimmer of a smile tugs at Kat’s lips.

“I’ll find a clerk to help us,” Martin says, and off he goes to find an employee to tally Kat’s choices.

I help Kat select a second doll so that her first one can have a friend, and some dresses for them and one of the doll-sized tea sets. We choose wooden beads with string and the wax crayons and a tablet of paper, and sets of children’s picture books and three jigsaw puzzles meant for older children, but which Kat is clearly interested in.

“She likes figuring them out,” Martin says of these, after he returns to us. “She’s good at those. You’ll see.”

Our last stop is a grocer’s, where I am able to get the things for the kitchen that Martin did not think to buy. Martin arranges for all our purchases to be delivered to the house. The day has been a stretch of satisfying hours so foreign it is almost as if I am watching another person’s day unfold. We leave the grocer’s and walk to the cable-car stop.

“Kat is tired,” Martin says, as the cable car clacks to a stop and people start getting off and on. “And all those deliveries are coming. You need to be there to receive them. Here you go.” He lifts Kat onto the open car and then holds out his arm so that I can board. I turn to face him once I’m standing on the car’s polished floorboards. Martin’s arm is outstretched; he is handing me the key to the house. Our house. I encircle my gloved hand around it.