She began to move across the street before the light turned red and before the cars passed, getting closer and closer but walking so confidently I’d believe even the drivers trusted what she was doing. I followed boldly behind her, standing up straighter, making myself bigger, by association. It was her attitude, that was the key. The gives-no-shits confidence she imbued—whether she felt it inside was irrelevant. The New Yorker shrugging things off. There’s nothing we haven’t seen and nothing we won’t do. We’re New Yorkers. We’re a different breed.

I expected to walk into the Starbucks across the street from the office where I was first introduced to the concept of people willingly spending seven dollars and fifty cents a day on ten ounces of slightly burned coffee, often just for the ambiance of bringing that paper cup to their mouth. I’d been there once before with Hilary—I got a Pike Place Roast and she got a soy latte—and when I asked for regular milk, instead of a nut variety, she looked at me like I’d just admitted to being the Son of Sam.

“I don’t do chains,” Lena said, walking past Starbucks’s stone entrance, a line of suited men and bloused women inside. “Shop small, and all that.”

Instead, we turned the corner and headed south on Fifth Avenue.

“What are you really doing here?” Lena asked. For a brief moment, I felt myself stop in the center of the street, my feet pausing over a white crossing line like they were stuck in concrete quicksand. She couldn’t possibly... “—in New York,” she continued. I put one foot in front of the other without skipping a beat, without her realizing that just a millisecond before my head was spinning. “There are PR firms everywhere. Why here? What’s your New York City Romance?”

“My what?” I asked.

“Your New York City Romance. Everyone has some movie that sent them here, romanticizing the city so it seems more approachable.”

It was like a light went off in my brain; suddenly that old Rolodex, the one that had been acquiring dust since freshman year of college, was awakened, pulled out of an old filing cabinet in the back of my brain and ready to get back to work. Magazine headlines I hadn’t thought about in years flew across my line of vision like a tennis ball in the US Open: Classic Romances Everyone Needs to See. Tips for a First Date from These Five Classic Romances. Meg Ryan’s Take on—

“You’ve Got Mail,” I said, hoping she didn’t ask for one plot detail.

“Interesting...”

We rounded the corner of 18th Street and stopped outside a glass-walled shop; a four-inch coffee cup epoxied to the glass door was the only thing letting you know it was a café.