Emmi arranges for Leo to meet Mia in a bid to redirect Leo toward a real-world romance, but the match also tests the boundary between Emmi’s friendship with Leo and her emotional investment in their correspondence. What begins as an exuberant recommendation becomes an actual introduction: Leo calls Mia, meets her, and continues seeing her. His new relationship develops outside the email exchange, yet Emmi remains its organizer, witness, and confidante.

The proposal and Leo’s resistance

The idea arrives to Emmi overnight. She presents Mia as an unusually promising match: thirty-four, single, attractive, intelligent, well-read, enterprising, cheerful, and a gym teacher. Her description is knowingly idealized, even comic in its confidence; she adds that Mia is vegetarian but suggests Leo could tell her meat is tofu. Emmi’s question is direct: should she introduce them? The matchmaking offers Leo a prospect beyond the screen, but it also gives Emmi a hand in shaping what happens next.

Leo initially declines. He says he has encountered many women resembling the polished, long-legged ideal Emmi describes, and argues that being single may be their own preference rather than a problem he should solve. He is not looking to meet a dream woman and says he is content with his life as it stands. His sister, who has heard excerpts from Emmi’s emails and seen three imagined candidates for her, also advises against a meeting between Leo and Emmi: she believes meeting would end a relationship that is doing Leo good. That warning clarifies the stakes surrounding the introduction. Leo’s correspondence with Emmi matters to him, and a new date does not erase his investment in their connection.

From suggestion to arranged coffee

The refusal does not hold. The next morning, Leo says he has reconsidered: if Emmi arranges it and Mia genuinely wants to meet, he will meet her. He asks Emmi to organize the practical details and proposes a weekend afternoon at a café in the city center, naming Café Huber, Europa, or Café Paris as possibilities. His consent makes Emmi’s suggestion actionable, while leaving her responsible for bridging the distance between two people who have not yet met.

Emmi contacts Mia, who is in principle willing to have coffee but doubts Leo’s intention. She suspects the proposal may be a ruse by her friend, who is determined to find her a partner, and wants to know what Leo looks like. Emmi can only say that she does not think he is ugly; she has seen Leo’s sister, not Leo himself. The qualification makes the arrangement’s uncertainties concrete: Emmi is acting as matchmaker for two people whose appearances and expectations she cannot fully verify. She anticipates that the meeting may come to nothing, but still passes along Mia’s willingness.

Leo then surprises Emmi by asking whether she seriously expects him to telephone Mia. He follows through and calls her, despite Emmi’s expectation that he would not. Emmi gives him Mia’s number and full name, Mia Lechberger. The call is a small but decisive shift from hypothetical correspondence to direct contact: Leo must introduce himself in his own voice rather than remain a figure whom Emmi describes and Mia doubts.

The meeting becomes a relationship

After the call, Mia reports to Emmi that Leo was unexpectedly nice: polite, friendly, somewhat shy, and charming. She also compliments his voice and accent. Emmi had not expected Leo to call, and her surprise gives way to a report of his successful first impression. Mia asks whether Emmi would like to join them when they meet. Emmi declines, saying Leo would not want her there; she describes herself to Mia as a fantasy figure with three faces, none of which Leo has seen and none of which he has chosen. The remark acknowledges that Emmi’s place in Leo’s life is intimate but undefined, and that her presence could complicate rather than facilitate their first meeting.

Leo later says the Sunday coffee with Mia was nice, then adds that they met again the following evening for Italian food at La Spezia in Kenienstrasse. He describes its quiet courtyard, unobtrusive music, and Piedmont wines, details that make the second date feel more settled and particular than Emmi’s initial portrait of a dream match. Within less than a week, he reports that they have met four times and hit it off, though he cautions that it is too early to predict what will happen. He wants time for both of them to understand their feelings and to determine whether their attraction is temporary or might have a future. He asks Emmi to be patient and says he imagines Mia wants the same discretion, given that Emmi is her best friend.

The arrangement’s emotional consequences

The match does not turn Leo and Mia’s relationship into a simple solution to Emmi’s own attachment. Earlier, Leo had explained that Emmi’s emails had become a second voice inside him, enriching his emotional life and helping him through loneliness after his mother’s death. He had also said that an in-person meeting with Emmi might destroy the magic of their exchange by replacing its unanswered questions with immediate reality. Against this background, his willingness to meet Mia is a movement toward offline intimacy that does not require him to meet Emmi. Emmi helps make that movement possible while remaining the person to whom Leo reports its progress.

The correspondence’s rhythms show that both friends have become sensitive to silence and delay. Emmi once tells Leo that after three days without a message she begins to wonder why and feels that something is missing. Later, when she leaves him waiting for two days, Leo says he feels left in midair and asks her to reply. Those earlier exchanges make her role in the matchmaking more than logistical: she and Leo have established an emotionally charged pattern of reaching for each other through email, even as she tries to direct his romantic attention elsewhere. When Emmi says she is beginning to feel addicted to his messages, Leo answers that he understands and asks whether she wants to know him in person. The question leaves their own possibility open even while Mia’s introduction is under way.

The book subsequently places this attempted redirection beside a different escalation in Emmi and Leo’s contact. After they exchange voices for the first time, Leo invites Emmi to come to his home, but she cannot bring herself to go. She writes that she thinks she loves him and that Bernhard has sensed it; the message is followed almost immediately by an automatic notice that Leo’s email address has changed and cannot receive incoming mail. That later rupture does not undo the dates arranged with Mia, but it sharpens their significance: Emmi has helped Leo pursue another relationship while her own bond with him has grown more difficult to contain. The matchmaking therefore changes the available shape of their intimacy without resolving its central tension.