In those heady days of the early relationship a subject she and Josh always came back to was Carmen’s future. They even developed an ironic pet name for the inevitable decision, calling it “the mind-body problem.” A running joke, it would pop up, with Carmen holding her coffee, or leaning against a doorframe with a glass of wine, saying—“I’ve had some thoughts on the mind-body problem.” For a while she had been trying to tell her mother that she wanted to do science full-time, and that this would necessitate graduate school, and that it was impossible to juggle two careers at once, and so on . . . But her mother had this insidious way of slowly working away at Carmen’s defenses, wheedling, marshalling her father, and, when that didn’t work, she’d get so worked up that she became the real victim of the fight. On top of that, modeling had become unignorably lucrative for Carmen, and unexpected sums poured easily into her bank account. Her reputation in the industry grew and she got on more flights, spending more nights away from Josh and her studies. It was not a career she had set out to choose, but she was in fact good at it, far more able to intuit what the industry side wanted than the other girls. At the same time, graduate schools had gotten back to her with rounds of interviews, so she got on more flights. Yet she couldn’t imagine leaving New York for these cold and lonely campuses, and therefore also leaving Josh, and so was banking everything on being accepted by her soon-to-be undergrad alma mater, Columbia University.

At Josh’s birthday that spring they had sat with his friends unwrapping presents around a bar table. Carmen had planned her present in secret for a long time, gathering the correct measurements for the blazer while keeping him oblivious to her true purpose, all so that he’d have something for job interviews as a research technician, which Josh said was a break before graduate school. Unwrapping the Armani blazer his face had fallen to the “oohs” and “ahhs” around the table. Afterward he’d been withdrawn until Carmen had prodded him enough for him to yell about how embarrassed he’d been—she had given him a thousand-dollar blazer, dammit, right in front of all his friends!