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where it ends for now,” she said. “I can’t have my roommates thinking I’m easy.”
    From then on we met every night after work. Angela still had three more weeks before the summer was over, which meant that we spent the whole of our days and all but the last hours of our night in close proximity. At the office we found excuses to come in constant contact. Angela came to my front desk to search for pens, staplers, paper clips, erasers, and when she ran out of office supplies to request, she asked for the first thing she could think of.
    “Do you have a map of Missouri, Jonas?” she asked me.
    “No,” I told her. “I forgot it at my apartment.”
    I found one at a used bookstore later that evening. Missouri was the place Angela most associated with home. “We lived in a lot of other places,” she told me. “Most of which I’d like to forget. But Missouri was the first one I remember. I think we lived there the longest, but who knows. I was probably too busy sucking my thumb to keep track of these things.” I left the map wrapped on her desk the next morning. She came by later to tell me that she loved her gift, and this time there was no sarcasm or even attempt at humor in her voice. She was genuinely moved, and it was important to her that I understood to what extent.
    For the rest of the summer, when we left the office, we did so ten minutes apart. We would meet outside the same wine bar we had gone to on our first date, and from there we would wander through the city for five or six hours since neither one of us had a private place that we could retreat to. Walking out in the open for so long only helped to draw us closer. There was too much space on the avenues, and the side streets were often too crowded with people and cabs hurrying to cut across town. To counter that we held each other’s hands and arms, ribs and waists.
    Angela joked that we were like a pair of stray cats. “We used to have them in the alleys when I was growing up,” she said, “and I always wondered what they did all night. Now I know.”
    Despite us both having lived in New York for years, neither of us had formed any deep, lasting attachments to particular quarters of the city. There were no streets that we were especially fond of, restaurants that we loved, or bars where we had once spent many hours sitting alone. Angela had come in as a serious student studying the law, while I had spent too much time wandering from one neighborhood and borough to the next to claim my stake on anything other than what was immediately before me. We deliberately set out to remedy that.
    “I want us to have a café,” Angela said. “Some place that I can always go to and think of as being ours.”
    On our fifth night together we found a vaguely French-themed café with marble tabletops and heart-shaped wooden chairs that we settled on as belonging to us.
    “Next we need a bench,” Angela said. “You can’t ever be an old couple unless you have a bench. It’s one of the rules of life.”
    We dedicated several evenings to trying out benches across the city. It was as close as we would ever come to house hunting, although we didn’t know that at the time. Instead we saw everything we did as a dress rehearsal for a future date in which we would join the ranks of young, happy couples who spent their days and nights searching for what they imagined to be the perfect home.
    “I don’t want a bench above Fourteenth Street,” I said.
    “And I don’t want one near or on a busy street.”
    “It has to have armrests.”
    “And a nice view. There has to be some sort of grass or a tree nearby.”
    “What about amenities?” I asked.
    “A restaurant with a bathroom not too far away would be nice.”
    “So would a bodega,” I said. “I get thirsty if I have to sit still for a long time.”
    The benches in and around Union Square within walking distance of Angela’s apartment were ruled out immediately—too loud and too crowded, and the