Back home at the end of the day, I’m still thinking of her. I search through our email correspondence. Some of my letters make me blush; effortful pontifications on Proust and Baudelaire, confessions about wanting to succeed as a writer so I could quit spinning records, reminders to send the essays she’d mentioned over that first coffee at the Nespresso café. My efforts were palpable and teeming with subdued flirtation—is there any way she couldn’t have known?

I come across one particular chain from six years earlier. Not long after our lunchless lunch date, I’d sent a first draft of a piece about my relationship with Kate. “I notice that sex is missing,” she’d written in response. “Also, you mention her orientation, but what about yours?”

“Sex is hard to write about,” I’d responded, ignoring the question of my sexuality. “I don’t want to be vulgar—is there anything worse?”

I sent her another essay a month later, about unattainable love as a quest for the familiar, a quest for home, for a homeland that may not exist. A quest for a mother. I wrote the second one, like the first, in the hopes that she would read it and that she would approve, that she would deem me interesting or worthwhile if not both. How many stories have been penned for unrequited love? How many must I write to earn my existence? There’s more to you than these obsessions. “I’m sending you this piece because you’re a writer and I value your aesthetic opinion,” I asserted in my email. I had built a barrier around my true feelings, one even I couldn’t break through, my love for her impervious to us both, my resistance impenetrable.

She did not care for the piece.

“From you, I expect more out of a story about love,” she’d written in response. “Tell us about something that left you shattered.”

SOON AFTER I MOVE INTO HER APARTMENT, ANOUK AND I watch a home video of my family from 1990. In a scene marked “Sunday Morning,” my father films us in the master bedroom of our house in the D.C. suburbs. Periodically, he points the camera at the full-length mirror and catches shots of himself. My mother lies in bed propped up against the headboard, a pot of coffee and two empty mugs on the nightstand. I sit in front of her, wearing a new vest and leggings that she bought for me from Limited Too, the tags still intact. Karim runs in circles wearing his pajama bottoms and a pillowcase around his neck like a cape, lisping, “I’m Thuperman!” A brand-new boxy Macintosh glows on a desk in the corner.