They’d met in New York toward the very end of the 1990s, but well enough before the actual end that by the time it was nigh, they had plans in place to spend it together, to spend New Year’s snow camping while all the world’s computers glitched, erasing time, rolling us all back to the Stone Age. These two—ever ready for anything, up for anything—would be ready even for this, spooning in their icy white cave or lying just outside it on their backs, in the cupped wings of their own angels, looking up not at the hyperbrilliance of Grucci fireworks but of native stars: stars scattered wild across the universe over Colorado, I think it was, or maybe Wyoming. That neither of them—one raised on the North Shore of Long Island, and the other on an island in South Jersey, both in Congregations Beth Shalom, both in homes kosher but not shomer Shabbat, where being American was an accident of history, English an accident of history, nature an accident of history—that neither of these two had even the faintest notion of how to make a fire, pitch a tent, or waterproof their stuff, let alone survive in subzero temperatures, fazed them not at all, because thus far they had been fantastically, almost mystically competent, not only in getting into good colleges and making their way in the world but also finding beauty in it. That they broke up for the first time before the end of that long, punishing-to-most-but-not-to-them millennium ever arrived was the reason they didn’t ultimately snow-camp, it should be said: Not because they couldn’t have figured it out. Not because her family, who still made vain gestures of influence, said crazy, said hypothermia. Not because the plane tickets were prohibitively expensive, not to mention all that waterproof gear. Not because either of them stopped believing, even for a second, in the true and the consoling brilliance of those stars.

They broke up over I don’t know what, and the pain was terrible, unbearable, at least for Sophie. Though for Ezra, too, I have to think, to lose a woman like her. They didn’t have cell phones yet, and the Internet was still dial-up and mostly vacant, and so for a while there was only silence between them, only crying and wondering, not knowing nor being able to know, which is to say: enduring, waiting. The event horizon came and went with each dry, not-freezing, and alone, though at midnight, drunk and feeling ruthless, she turned to the guy who’d been talking her into the wall—me—and kissed him.