This close, I could see that she was in her late twenties and pretty in a simple, put-together way. She was wearing a pale-green silk jumper that toed the line between pajamas and high fashion but skewed solidly enough toward the latter. She’d paired it with flat gladiator sandals and a small rectangular purse that was slung across her body. Her nails were painted a bright, vibrant red, and I didn’t have to look closely to know that there wasn’t a single chip there. And then there was the bob, cut into wispy layers that made her hair seem to bounce around her face, even though she was standing still.

I smiled back and averted my eyes quickly, moving past her to push back the gate and walk into the park. My feet sunk into the grass, and I looked around at what was an average, tiny park fashioned out of a sliver of empty space on Chicago’s Gold Coast. I drove by the small spaces frequently, wondering what it must be like to grow up playing in something so small, so manufactured. When I was a kid, I played in our large suburban backyard, or my parents took me out to a forest preserve about ten miles away where I could run around to my heart’s content.

The park was quaint and well-manicured, with a large play area in the middle and four benches surrounding it. Everything was tiny but pretty and well-kept, and it occurred to me that on another day, this would be a nice place to come to read a book.

The small park was relatively crowded for the time of day. There were two women with Starbucks cups in their hands, watching a pair of dogs that were chasing each other. On the other side of the park, a man and woman sat side by side on a bench with three dogs scurrying around their feet. It was at that moment that the absurdity of my excursion went to a whole new level.

I wasn’t just in a park.

I was in a dog park.

And it must have been obvious to all four people who looked up as I walked into the small space—I did not have a dog.

I smiled and kept walking, feeling unbearably suspicious, because the reality of the matter was, I was unbearably suspicious. I paused for a minute, a few feet in, unsure what to do next. I could go and sit down on one of the benches, but then I’d be that woman—dogless, bookless, and friendless—who’d just come to watch the dogs play. I’d left everything besides my phone and my keys in the car. It didn’t help that none of the small benches were empty, so I’d have to sit down next to one of the two groups.

I took a deep breath.

There’s no crime in going to the park, Paula.