The next week Carmen was officially accepted into Columbia University for graduate school. The same day she called her agency to terminate their representation of her, knowing what it would bring. Then she had called her mother. Josh held her hand as they both sat on the edge of the bed and co-listened to the tinny sounds from the phone, starting with—“It’s going to be so hard, honey.” which eventually turned to—“You should really consider keeping modeling as a side job just in case.” to—“The amount of work we’ve put in, for you, for your career, is something that not everyone gets, not everyone gets parents like us.” to—“Well, your lifestyle is going to change completely and don’t count on any support from your father either, that’s over.” After the call Josh had sat holding her as they watched TV late into the night.

The next day on waking beside him she felt she had snapped into focus suddenly at the age of twenty-one, as if a scene had been set and a movie had begun to play of their lives together. She knew exactly what she was going to do with her life, and who she was going to do it with.

Possibly she felt this way because, prior to that relationship, Carmen had never been in love. She had, of course, osmotically absorbed a great deal of information about love from popular culture, from TV shows to pop songs. And she was an avid reader. So she had been exposed to countless explicit in-depth descriptions, from Tristan and Isolde to Anna Karenina to Romeo and Juliet. She knew everything there was to know about love, all the facts of it, long before she experienced it for herself. But when it was her, when she was the one in love, each moment had somehow been completely new and unexpected, perfectly unpredictable—the irreducible indexical fact that it was her experiencing all this blasted away all the prior facts and models and the knowledge she had accumulated and left something raw, fragile, alive. In his company, in their funny and sweet little life together for the next few years, everything became as sensible and obvious as Euclid’s axioms.