In the beginning, there was happiness.

Maya remembered how nervous Noah had been when they met, clenching and unclenching his hands and repeatedly brushing a single dark curl off his forehead. The curl always fell right back, the act fruitless. At first this disoriented Maya, seeing how nervous he was despite being attractive. And though she was an artist who believed the very idea of objective beauty was suspect, she had to admit he was objectively beautiful. In the years to come, she often caught people staring at his aristocrat cheekbones, his flop of dark hair, his broad and perfectly articulated shoulders. But when he spoke to her that first time, he stammered, tripping over the academic phrases she’d used from her training in art history, and almost immediately he confessed, “I’m sorry, I only really know science.”

He had wandered into her student symposium talk, which wasn’t technically public, but the way he carefully crept in and took a seat behind the professors made it seem like he’d been invited. She’d been presenting on a Japanese photographer she admired, who had been a major inspiration for her own painting practice. When the talk was over and the congratulations offered, the professors dispersed. The stranger hung around, waiting to speak to her.

“That’s all right,” Maya said. “Art is for everyone.” She felt stupid for blurting out a trite aphorism, but he gulped it right up. She felt like taking it back would be taking it from him. Her offhand thought was that she was safe.

She asked what kind of science he studied, assuming he was a graduate student, if an older one. He was white and had the same look of the intense white guys in the math department who had a nearby seminar at the same time as hers. He mumbled that he actually worked for JPL, the NASA research lab, as a physicist. Oh, she thought, so he’s smart, I’m in trouble. As the room emptied, they remained talking. At one point, when neither of them moved for a spell, the motion-​­sensor lights flicked off.