He picked a restaurant in the West Village.
Not near the bakery — two blocks away from it, which was either coincidence or something deliberate that I chose not to examine too closely because both possibilities felt like the right answer for different reasons. Small, Italian, the kind of place that had been on the same corner for thirty years and had stopped needing to prove itself sometime around the second decade. Dark wood, candles, a menu that changed with the season and didn't explain itself.
I had walked past it a hundred times.
I had never been inside.
I spent Friday evening doing the thing I had told myself I wasn't going to do, which was stand in front of my closet for forty-five minutes making decisions that were, objectively, not difficult. I had a black dress. I had a green
