I had a map. It was a good map. It had got me through my twenties without a scandal and through a boyfriend I liked in the way you like a well-run kitchen. Men, in a particular order of acts, a particular volume of wanting. I am Elise. I am thirty-one. I live in Berlin in a flat that faces a courtyard, and until a Thursday in October I would have told you, honestly, that I knew the shape of my own desire.

Lena sat across from me at the end of a dinner that had been about work and then stopped being about work. Thirty-four. Short hair, a mouth with a small scar at the corner, hands that talked when she did. She walked me home because the courtyard building is easy to miss. At the door she didn't do the lean. She said,…