I watch her approach the dirty towels, replace the full basket with an empty one, and then wheel the full basket back down the hall, a crease in her too-tight scrubs forming on her underwear line as she walks away. She probably had to buy brand-new, crisp white panties for this job. I’m shocked management doesn’t require something a little more seamless.

In the lobby, I grab my sneakers from the cubby near the front desk. My black APLs beetle from the other swanky and vague “performance shoes” because of their pristine condition: stark white soles, untattered knit heel. The same shade of blackest black as my leggings and the fitted sweatshirt I pulled over my head when class ended. I’ve found the state of someone’s shoes in Manhattan implies the state of their bank account.

I peel my phone out of the shoe and scroll through the notifications as I slip them on: links from Lena with last-minute centerpiece ideas (as if the wedding hasn’t been planned to the last, tiniest detail for months, if not years); Graham’s dinner question; emails from Kiley, our office assistant, confirming my meetings tomorrow; and, of course, a voice mail from the unknown number.

As soon as I push through the glass studio doors and onto a particularly bustling Amsterdam Avenue, I feel a chill from my bones outward. It’s unseasonably cold for October, a time when New York City usually sees an additional week or two of summer and everyone walks around in sundresses and shorts, denouncing global warming skeptics while drinking rosé at tables set up on the sidewalks. But after burning calories in a ninety-two-degree room for sixty minutes, it feels like the tundra.

There are hot yoga studios on the Upper East Side, the closest just five blocks from his—well, our—72nd Street apartment. But two years ago, I chose this one, 2.2 miles across the Park. Initially, it was a way to encourage Graham to explore the neighborhood—“meet me for coffee after yoga and we can walk around”—so that maybe he’d want to look into apartments up there, in the buildings occupied by Tina Fey and Jerry Seinfeld and other new money New Yorkers. But his Upper East Side roots are dug too deep for swaying, so I gave up that battle and now use my studio’s location as an excuse to get an extra four-mile run in a few days a week. In anticipation of the size two gown (in traditional sizing, I refuse to acknowledge wedding sizes) that will be sewn onto my body in approximately one hundred and thirty-two hours, I’ve been gradually upping the ante, adding fifty calories to my daily active burn goal every few weeks, which has landed me now at a whopping eight hundred and fifty a day, a feat that’s forced me into two-or three-a-days to pull off.