Excuse me, the message read, I’m sorry to intrude! Your photos are very beautiful. Thank you for sharing. I would love to buy you a drink—are you in NY? Sorry to be so forward. I hope you have a lovely day—Olivia

olivia, I replied, where do you live in ny?

Baby? Romi said loudly from the hall. Are you okay in there?

I’m fine, I said.

Olivia was replying in real time.

Clinton Hill, Olivia wrote. BK! Are you in NY too?

ya

Would you like to meet?

who are you

Olivia sent a link to a social-media profile.

Do you want some coffee? Romi called through the door. I opened Olivia’s profile. I didn’t know what to think. I put down my phone and yelled, Yes, over the flush of the toilet.

You can see why I didn’t trust myself. There was no reason, in the first place, that I should feel so beautiful and isolated. I had a lovely girlfriend—selfless, adoring, great in bed, with the strong arms and shoulders produced by years of rugby. Yet for reasons that were still unclear to me I had uploaded the photos the previous evening while sitting only two feet away from her, after dinner, while she answered some emails.

The only thing I was clear on was why I had never shown Romi the photos. Romi was the noblest person I had ever met. I liked extreme people, people who seemed to embody an unambiguous idea about life. What would it feel like to be unwaveringly good? The poles of Romi’s nobility were her self-sacrificing nature and her absolute insusceptibility to the superficial. From a young age, she had prized a sense of competence and the belief that she was capable of making a significant social contribution. After toying with the possibility of a political career, she had decided to pursue pediatrics. In her off-hours she volunteered as an EMT.

She was so preoccupied with her vocation that she was immune to beauty. The concept hadn’t occurred to her outside an introductory art-history course. Her choices were made on the basis of function. The building she lived in was expensive and tasteless, full of beige amenities. Aside from the special uniforms required for exercise or job interviews, every piece of clothing she owned had been picked up for free at some athletic tournament or at the annual reunion for which her fit, cheerful family ordered matching polos. She ate sandwiches and salads and she ate them exclusively at chain restaurants.

Her consistency was perfect. She’d decided she was attracted to me even before she had any idea what I looked like—when all she knew about me, as I liked to joke later on, was that I was a woman with an excellent memory for the names of novelists whose work I’d never read. We had met two years earlier on a crossword app that matched users of comparable ability. Romi was much better than I was at the crossword, but she was hampered by little free time and an aversion to competitive spite. As we chatted over a few months I found I liked the generosity of Romi’s messages—even when I failed spectacularly, she never teased me—and she endeared herself to me with the general bent of her knowledge, which was always embarrassing in areas of art or pop culture but acute with regard to politics, history, and the crucial art of synonyms. It felt lucky that she was a young gay woman, only five years older than I was and separated from me by only about a mile.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman (Europa Editions, £12.99) is out now.

Book of the week: read an extract of Acts Of Service by Lillian Fishman