When he woke up in the morning after the three hours of postdawn sleep they’d decided to allow each other, he watched her for a few minutes. She was still so pretty in the daylight, even with smudged mascara and caked saliva in the corner of her mouth. He went out to get breakfast. He stood in line for bagels and coffee, and he had never felt so normal and American in his life. He had a girl waiting for him back at his apartment, and it was Saturday morning, and so he was going to bring her a bagel and some coffee. He was overwhelmed by the simplicity of his emotions: gratitude for whatever moments had worked to make this moment happen for him; happiness, yes, just pure plain happiness. He loved his country! He was going to eat a bagel!

He was learning from Rachel, too. They went skiing—he had never been skiing before, but she’d learned because her school had a ski trip every year and finally, when she was a senior, her grandmother handed over the $250 and let her go. She was helping him negotiate the strange, surprising, suddenly political machinations of medical school that were beyond good grades. His residency advisor didn’t like how sarcastic he was; Aaron Schwartz, a sallow-skinned pigeon of a guy he knew not just from Princeton, but who had gone to his high school in Los Angeles, was also in his med school class and kept getting favored for surgeries. Rachel talked to him about how to talk to people. She taught him how the fact that he was naturally funny also meant that he had a side that favored a quick burn, which wasn’t so good. She taught him to slow down and consider people’s faces, that this was the most crucial exercise in all of negotiation, and eventually he did it—he learned to listen to people and to look them in the eyes. And wouldn’t you know, when he finally was able to enact these skills, he became a better doctor, one who could understand his patients’ suffering more specifically, who could listen more closely for clues. He shot ahead of Aaron Schwartz, earning praise from the doctors in charge and his teachers for his sensitivity and intuition. He would always commend her for teaching him a skill that no one had taught him throughout all his years of med school, and she would respond, “That’s because they don’t want you to get ahead.” When she said that, he’d realize she wasn’t trying to make him a better person; she was trying to get him to advance. That was all she’d ever tried to do for him. But, he reasoned, that was because she thought he was a good enough person as it was.

Toby now began to pace the bedroom. “He’s met me. He knew you were married. We’d been out to dinner with him and his wife.”

“Yeah, well that’s how scumbags operate, Toby.”

“Did you remind him that he knew me?”

“I’m sorry, Toby, no, I didn’t, I really didn’t realize this was about you at the time.”

But it was a little about him, wasn’t it? This was his wife! It’s one thing to hit on someone whose spouse you don’t know. But he was real. Toby was real. And Matt Klein didn’t even see him as threat enough to stop himself from hitting on her. Matt barely registered Toby’s existence. Matt was not afraid of Toby’s wrath.

It was hard for Toby to pinpoint exactly when he’d noticed the change in her. Yes, she spoke to her subordinates like they were pieces of shit, but that was the culture at Alfooz & Lichtenstein—that was how they taught their employees to survive, or something. Toby would express surprise when he heard her on the phone talking to an intern or an assistant—it particularly seemed that asst2 couldn’t find his ass from his ass these days. He would hear her on the phone saying, “You forget who you are talking to,” and “I’m sorry, but do you think I’m an idiot?” and “Honestly, I am listening to you and cannot believe what is coming out of your mouth,” and “No offense, but when I hire at a Yale job fair, I expect someone with a little light behind the eyes,” and “I saw those press kits and it looks like a homeless person off the street did them.” He assumed the stress of her work was sending her into overdrive. But then she said things to her clients like “Oh my God, were we the same person in another life?” and “You are too much,” and “That is amazing,” and “You are amazing.” See? She was also capable of that, which made the fact that she didn’t do it at home harder to stomach.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this when it happened?”

There were several possible acceptable answers to this for Toby: that she didn’t take it seriously, that she didn’t want to hurt Toby, that she barely registered it the minute it happened, so in love was she with her husband—all these would have been fine. Instead she went with: “I didn’t think to. It was just something that happened at work. Do you tell me everything that happens at your work? Actually, don’t answer that, maybe you do.”

He didn’t like how not a part of this story he was. He didn’t like that he was only hearing about this because it was mitigating information against something else that had happened that day. He didn’t like that she didn’t seem to think her marriage was relevant to all of this.

Having an unconscious patient was like talking to someone on the phone for hours before ever seeing them: It was hard to reconcile that they hadn’t been what you pictured, and your brain, having never seen the person, corrected for them to be more of what you wished they were. Toby had pictured someone smart and complicated, though he didn’t know why. He had not pictured someone who posed for pictures lasciviously, with her tongue hanging out. But there she was, on Amy’s screen: alive, with thoughts and opinions and preferences and animating forces, like a breath was blown into her and she was made sentient. The exact opposite of what actually had happened, which was that a breath was blown out of her and she was made into just the sum of her biological parts. He looked at a picture of her holding up a shot of something at a bar. She looked into the camera with defiance. It was awfully sexy. The picture could easily be one of the supplementary pics from a Hr profile, not the main one but a third or fourth. He had to look away from the phone in order to restore her to personhood and patienthood, and only briefly did he think to wonder if he was doing a bad job of thinking of the women he dated as people.

They lay on the carpet in her living room, under a top sheet, staring at the ceiling and talking. Her parents had emigrated to Paris from Iran right before she was born. Her family had moved to the U.S. when she was twelve. Then, when she was nineteen, her family moved to Queens. Her father sold vertical blinds in Kew Gardens Hills. She said she felt like she was the only Iranian whose family didn’t escape the shah with a treasure chest of jewels. Just down the road in Forest Hills, there were Persian women laden with riches whose homes were filled with sculptures. Nahid? She had blinds in every room.

She waited. He didn’t want to tell her anything else, mostly because he still didn’t understand what he could say that wouldn’t make him seem like all the women who had told him their stories. They’d always seemed like such victims. The way they would talk about the betrayals that led to hurt and the intensity that became apathy—it made him wonder what the men’s side of the story was. Here he thought of Rachel and Sam one more time, lo mein cartons in hand. What could she be telling him about Toby? Surely not: “I changed the terms of who I was and what I wanted with just about no warning.” Instead it was: “He was lazy and punished me for having ambition.”

Through Toby’s eyes, it was unsettling just how much all the other women really did look like me. It was what I resented about where I lived, that after a lifetime of feeling lesser than the skinny blondes with straight hair and noses in Manhattan, I most hated that everyone here looked exactly like me. Or did I hate looking exactly like everyone else? Or did seeing them en masse like this allow me to finally see myself clearly and the view was no bueno? Our navy tankinis were reinforced with steel paneling so that our bodies were all mashed and wrung into hourglass figures, while our limbs told the true stories of our discipline and metabolic limitations.

I caught Adam staring at me. He stared at me a lot lately, but he never asked questions. I had begun to go outside at night and lie on our hammock. Adam resented it. He’s linear and infers rules from onetime behaviors, which drives me crazy. “But you hate going outside,” he’d say. And yet, there I was, outside, busting open the contract he held on me. He’d go back in and put the kids to bed and I would look up at the sky. You could see some stars where I lived. You could never see them in Manhattan. That was one advantage of this place, I guess.