MIDWAY THROUGH THE TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS, WE WERE A given one free afternoon in “town,” a strip composed of Plato’s Closet, Pizza Hut, and a Christian bookstore. It was one of the perks advertised on the Ledge’s website and that Nancy had touted, along with the “gourmet” food. During our outing, I picked up a few extra T-shirts and a pair of Umbro shorts at Plato’s Closet. I then wandered into the Christian bookstore. “I would encourage you to look at why this happens,” Charlotte had said, “and what’s really going on.” There was no psychology section, just philosophy, and I picked a book by Søren Kierkegaard off the shelf. I hadn’t read him since an undergrad class on religious existentialism, but I recalled that angst was his specialty. I sat on the floor in back of the bookshop and started reading Either/Or. “Desire in our age is simultaneously sinful and boring, because it desires what belongs to the neighbor.”

I tossed the book aside and took out my notebook. At the top of a blank page I wrote and underlined the word Charlotte. Underneath it, I wrote, First sighting: Yoga class. No conversation. No attraction yet. 2nd sighting: Cafeteria. Skipped mashed potatoes, went straight to salad bar. Eating disorder suspected, later confirmed. Still no attraction. 3rd sighting: Group, Day 6.

At the start of group each morning we did an emotional check-in. “I’m feeling frustrated,” I’d announced on the first day that Charlotte was working with us, “by how much time we’ve wasted so far. A lot of the things we’ve done so far seem pretty unnecessary.”

When it was Charlotte’s turn to check in, she’d said she felt the same. “Time is money. It shouldn’t be wasted.” We made eye contact and she smiled, a thick curl falling onto her face. I smiled back.

Attraction detected.

In my notebook, I tried to identify that moment for others. “Let’s say I was to write you a love letter,” the nutritionist said to me during group three summers ago, and all the other lollipop heads turned to look at me as if something had actually transpired. “I would need to eat carbs to have the energy for that.”

In my journal, I marked down, Nutritionist: a hypothetical remark, misinterpreted as suggestive. I had already scheduled a one-on-one session for the following day, and after our first appointment I started seeing her once a week. Before each meeting I would plan what issues I’d present and what references I’d casually toss into our conversation, ones specifically designed to impress her based on information I’d gleaned from her semi-public Myspace page. And it worked: a few weeks later we were deep in all-night online chats. “I would get in so much trouble right now if anyone knew I was doing this,” she confessed, and I smiled at the illicitness of our correspondence.