NYC. “It’s anonymous living,” Kiera says. Good bagels, though. If she could go back, she’d first go to La Reine Bakery, where a masked face behind a glass would place the brown bag on the counter. It would contain a toasted poppyseed bagel with cream cheese, which Kiera would enjoy on her walk back through busy Manhattan blocks.

Or maybe she’d go to Thai on Lex. In high school, Kiera and her best friend Lia would order chicken Pad Thai and sit at one of the tables in the back for hours. “It’s the one place they don’t kick you out.” They made a pact, Lia and Kiera, not to tell anyone else about the spot. Except Kiera broke it in college, when she brought one of her friends to the spot. But Lia broke the pact, too. It was even.

Kiera and Lia were the type of elementary school playmates whose names were always near each other on alphabetical lists: attendance, kindergarten graduation, and parent teacher conferences. It wasn’t until fifth grade that they became friends. So naturally, when they were sitting side by side on stage at their high school graduation ten years later, they hatched a prank to stand up together and join the choir in song. Of course, she tells me, they made sure to do it after officially receiving their diplomas.