Surprisingly, this was not the only scavenger hunt that Ezra had participated in as of late. About six months ago, just at the start of summer, Mimi’s company had been trial-running an in-person dating option. The site was still in beta testing, and they’d had another influx of Silicon Valley funding (though Mimi was still mostly paid in stock options and thus constantly tight on money), and their cash on hand meant they could throw additional parties and events and test-drive user satisfaction and algorithms. (Ezra never really got the sense that anyone in charge knew exactly what they were doing.) The event was in San Francisco, so Ezra had tagged along: he was in talks to join a new search engine start-up, the unfortunately named “Google,” and Mimi always preferred to have a plus-one (ergo the aborted trip to Prague with Gregory six weeks later). The scavenger hunt was mostly a bar crawl through downtown on a Saturday afternoon; Ezra had a dinner with the Google executives that night, so he sipped his beers and deflected when Mimi kept pushing shots on the gathered figurative guinea pigs. Mimi herself was not much of a drinker. She enjoyed white wine and an occasional spritzer, but she, like him, preferred to remain in control. Also, Mimi didn’t need booze: she got drunk off social situations—she literally grew more animated in a crowd, as if she were a rechargeable battery, and what jazzed her up, what turned her on, was people. It made her perfectly suited for the job—sober but still riotous; clearheaded but an absolute ball of a good time. Admittedly, Ezra found this side of her draining. But it was such a small thing, her manic energy, her overzealous cacophony at a party, that in the scheme of their perfect match, he ignored it. She tried to egg him on, to sweep him up in her tornado, but all of it mainly left him exhausted. Despite his reluctance, she liked it when he joined her because she would often stand in front of the crowd, arm linked into his, and say something like: You might be skeptical about Datify. I get it! I was too! But then I met my literal perfect match. Ezra would see people in the back of the room stand on their tippy-toes to catch sight of him, and he’d do something like take a small bow or kiss her on the cheek, and then everyone else would glance around to see if their match was among them too. Being in front of a crowd made Ezra grind his teeth, set off small flares of anxiety. Sometimes he would chew the inside of his lip to quell the nerves, and sometimes he’d have to stuff his hands into his pockets so they didn’t outwardly tremble, but he did it for Mimi because he loved her. And she never seemed to notice his anxiety, which was probably for the best, since he’d never explained it all.

The night of the scavenger hunt in San Francisco they were at their twelfth bar somewhere in the Mission District, traveling in a horde of fifty or so singles, when Ezra tried to leave for his Google dinner. As it was, he doubted he’d make dinner on time, and naturally, punctuality (and first impressions) mattered to Ezra. He’d tried to peel off, and Mimi said, “No! Ez! You can’t go! Why would you leave me for some silly dinner?” She was at her most gregarious by now, her not-technically-drunk-but-still-exhausting extroverted self.