“Here,” he said, “I got you this.” He held out the baggie like he had just found it in the hal way before he came into her apartment, like it was a normal thing to do to hand a goldfish to a girl you barely knew.

“Oh,” Lauren said. “Thank you. I guess I should put these in some water.” Mark didn’t laugh. Either he didn’t get the joke or he didn’t think she was funny. She couldn’t decide which was worse.

Mark stood by the door while Lauren looked in her cabinets for an appropriate fish bowl. She final y settled on a glass mixing bowl she never used. Was the water supposed to be lukewarm or cold? She didn’t know. She settled on lukewarm so that the fish wouldn’t be chil ed, and dumped him into the water. It smel ed.

Lauren had won her other fish at the Pumpkin Festival when she was seven, and named her Rudy, after Rudy Huxtable from The Cosby Show.

Her parents were annoyed. “You won a fish?” they asked when she came home. They rol ed their eyes and warned her that it would probably die soon. They dug up an old fishbowl from the basement and bought fish food. “Don’t get too attached,” they told her. But little Rudy raged on. She swam fiercely year after year. When they final y found Rudy floating bel y-up at the top of the bowl, the whole family was shocked. It was as though they’d expected her to live forever; as though they’d forgotten that her dying was even a possibility.

Lauren watched the new fish swim around. He looked weak. Not like Rudy at al . “I guess I’l need to stop and get fish food,” she said.

“Just give it some bread crumbs,” Mark said. He sounded like he wasn’t the one who’d brought her the fish in the first place.

“I’m not sure that fish can eat bread,” Lauren said. Mark just shrugged.

“What are you going to name him?” he asked.

Lauren considered this. Should she name the fish Rudy as a good-luck gesture? Maybe it would help strengthen the little guy.

“Wil ard,” she final y said. “After Wil ard from Footloose. ”

“Where?”

“Footloose. The movie?”

“Never heard of it,” Mark said. He looked at his watch and then back at Lauren.

“Wel then, we’l have to watch it,” Lauren said. “It’s amazing.”

“You ready?” Mark asked. Lauren nodded and put her coat on.

“Good night, Wil ard,” she said to the bowl. She left the light on in the kitchen so that he wouldn’t be disoriented.

Mark was odd. Lauren knew that. She knew from the time that he approached her in the deli that he was not normal. He interrupted her while she was putting Equal in her coffee. “Hel o,” he said, and she jumped in mid-stir.

“Hi,” she said. She was running late to meet a client and didn’t have time for pleasantries with a stranger.

“I’ve seen you here before,” he said. “Every morning around this time, I see you here getting your coffee and sometimes a bagel.”

Lauren stared at him. She had never noticed him before. “Real y?” she asked. It didn’t occur to her until later that she should be nervous.

“Here’s my card,” he said. “Cal me. I’d like to take you out.”

Lauren took the card, but didn’t look down at it. “Okay.”

“I look forward to hearing from you,” he said. Then he turned and walked out.

Lauren thought that was sort of cocky. He was very handsome. She could give him that. But stil , people didn’t just approach other people in the middle of their morning coffee to ask them out. Did they? No, they did not.

Lauren thought about him al during her appointments that day. She was escorting a young Kansas City couple around. They were relocating to the city and wanted to find a place immediately. The wife had blond hair and wore a pastel minidress. She complained about every place they saw.

“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “It’s so smal . It’s just so smal .”

“This is pretty standard for a one-bedroom in New York,” Lauren said. The wife glared at her.

“We want to have children soon. Babies,” the wife said. Lauren nodded.

“Right. Wel , a lot of people in this building put up a wal for a second bedroom. It’s a pretty nice size, so you wouldn’t feel so tight for space.”

The wife looked at Lauren’s hand. “Are you married?” she asked.

Lauren shook her head. She reminded herself to be nice so that she wouldn’t lose a good commission. This couple had to move soon. They were against renting. They were a guarantee buy.

“I’m not married,” Lauren said. “But one of my best friends lives in a building very similar to this one, and they put up a wal to make a bedroom for their little boy. It might be hard to imagine what it would look like, but if you picture it over there you might get a better idea.”

“I think that would work nicely,” the husband said. “Don’t you?” He put his arm around his wife and squeezed her shoulder. He had been chipper al day. He felt guilty for making them move and was trying to make it up to his miserable pastel wife.

“If you want to see some bigger places, we could look in Brooklyn or maybe Hoboken,” Lauren offered.

The wife shook her head. “No,” she said. “We want to be in Manhattan. We told you that. Didn’t you listen?” She walked away and stood facing the wal with her arms crossed. Her husband gave Lauren a little smile and went to stand next to his wife. Lauren waited quietly while the couple stared at their imaginary baby’s imaginary room. Sometimes, she knew, people just needed a little time to be able to picture themselves in a new place, to see possibility in a blank space. And so she waited.

Lauren cal ed Mark that night. She didn’t even mean to. Not real y. She was eating take-out sushi and saw his card in her purse. She dialed before she could real y think about it.

“Hi,” she said when he answered. “Mark?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s … hi, it’s Lauren? From the deli?” She realized after she introduced herself that she had never told him her name.

“Hi, Lauren.” He sounded not one bit surprised. He sounded like he’d been waiting for her cal .

“So,” she said. “So, I decided to give you a cal .”

“So you did.” He was silent and Lauren waited. She decided not to say one more word and just when she was about to give in, he asked her to dinner.

“Sure,” she said. “That would be fun.”

“It’s nice,” Mark said on their third date, “that you eat.” Lauren had just ordered steak. His comment made Lauren sure that he had only dated anorexic girls in the past, thin, waify people who only ordered salad. The whole idea made her tired.

They went back to his apartment that night. It was clean. No, not clean. It was OCD. There was almost nothing on the shelves. No magazines lying around the coffee table. No pictures or knickknacks. Nothing. It looked like an apartment after she’d staged it to be sold, wiped clean of al traces that a human lived there.

“It’s nice,” she said.

“I know,” Mark said.

His bed was low to the ground, with a plain, dark blue cover. He stood in the bedroom and started taking off his shirt, unself-consciously, as though they had been together for years. He hung it up in his closet and then took off his pants. Lauren stood there, trying not to watch but also trying not to have it be obvious that she wasn’t watching.

“Do you need a shirt to sleep in, or are you okay in your underwear?”

“A shirt would be nice,” Lauren said. Who the hel was this guy? He went over to his drawer and took out a perfectly folded T-shirt that said

“Colgate” on it.

“Did you go to Colgate?” she asked.

“No, I went to Princeton.”

“Right.”

Lauren went into the bathroom to change, and for the first time that night got very nervous. She didn’t know this guy at al . She had never met any of his friends, had no idea if he was tel ing the truth about where he worked, or even what his name was. Lauren had just watched American Psycho on TV the other night, which was a mistake. She was short of breath. Had she even agreed to stay over? Al he’d said was “Do you want to come back to my place?” This was pretty presumptuous of him, wasn’t it?

She took her phone out of her purse and sent Isabel a a text message that she was at Mark’s apartment, and then she sent the address. At least someone would know where she was. Although, if she was dead, it wouldn’t help much, would it?