He’d have the money thing figured out in no time.

“Miles, stop !” yelled Stevie from somewhere else in the house.

“No, you stop!” he yelled back.

My instinct was to intervene before one of them sent the other to urgent care, but Sanjay was awake—he could do it. I began going through the motions of making coffee as I waited for him to intervene.

“I’m telling Mommy!” Stevie hollered. “Mommy!”

Miles reacted by screeching like a chimpanzee. A passerby would have reasonably wondered whether he had just snapped his femur, but I knew better. This was his power play to Stevie’s tattling.

I paused, then poured fresh water from the coffee carafe into the machine.

The screaming continued.

I measured coffee grounds and tapped them into the coffee maker’s metal filter, trying to ignore my pounding head.

There was a sudden surge of silence. I smiled, thinking Sanjay had finally intercepted.

Then a heavy thud and a new cry—a real one. I pressed the “Start” button on the coffee maker and marched into the living room.

Stevie, clad in her nightgown, was sitting on Miles’ chest. “What?” she said, like I was interrupting a private moment between them.

Miles’ face was crimson, and he was gasping for breath. “Help!” he wheezed.

“Get off your brother before I spank you,” I said to Stevie.

Still sitting, she glared at me like I had already swatted her. Then she began to berate me. “Our family rule is use your words! Hitting is mean , Mommy! Mean!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, were those your words sitting on your brother’s chest suffocating him?” I pointed up the stairs. “Go up to your room and get dressed, or I’ll show you mean .”

Glowering, she lifted herself off of Miles.

“Go!” I yelled.

Miles’ face was returning to its natural color, but he was still lying there crying. And as I looked at him more closely, I realized he was also looking at me as if I were the ghost of Joan Crawford. “Don’t spank Stevie, Mommy!” he yelled.

The enemy of my son’s enemy was his beloved sister. “Oh, come on, Miles. I’m not going to and you know it.”

“Then why did you say it?” he wailed.

Desperation? Another occasion that felt like rock bottom but was actually a trapdoor to somewhere even lower? It was anyone’s guess. “Go up to your room and get dressed,” I told him. “Now.”

Then I went to look for Sanjay. He wasn’t in the living room, so I assumed he had fallen back asleep. But when I reached our room, I found him sitting up in bed on his laptop with a pair of headphones on.

“Hey,” I said, though what I wanted to say was Headphones or not, how the hell did you miss that racket?

He pulled the headphones from his ears. “Hey.”

“Didn’t you hear the kids?” I said.

“No,” he said, glancing at the screen. “Sorry. I was working.”

I reminded myself not to scold him for doing what I asked him to. “That’s great, but it’s Friday. The kids have to be at camp in forty-five minutes, and I need to hop in the shower and get to work.”

“I’m sorry.” He seemed sincere. “I was just really caught up in this.”

My head was throbbing. Three glasses of wine on a school night! Who did I think I was, Mick Jagger? “What are you working on?” I asked. Naturally, I was hoping he would say job applications.

He smiled shyly. “You know that jazz article I’ve been working on for the past several months?”

No. “Yes,” I said.

“I was doing it on spec for the Atlantic ,” he said. “Remember?”

Now I remembered. Alex had put Sanjay in touch with someone at the publication, who had passed Sanjay’s pitch to the web editor. He had liked the concept, but since Sanjay didn’t have a lot of national credits to his name, the editor said he would have to write the entire piece before they bought it.

“It’s the one about the lost history of jazz’s impact on American politics,” he added.

“Right—you were excited about that. How’s it coming?”

He sat up and closed his computer. “It’s done. I sent it in yesterday.”

“You did?” I couldn’t disguise my surprise. Sanjay had been a perfectly efficient worker at Hudson , but he had been a junior editor back then, writing little more than headlines and photo captions. As a journalist, however, I had known him to obsess over a single paragraph for a full week. Really, the more he cared about something, the less likely he was to finish it. As such, I had half assumed he’d still be working on the Atlantic article when the ball dropped in Times Square at the end of the year.

“Yes, and the editor already read it and just wrote to say she loved it. And I quote: ‘No major edits needed.’”

“That’s wonderful!”

“They’re going to publish it in October. Online and in the magazine. Print triples my fee.”

I walked over to him and kissed him. “I am so proud of you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “But there’s more.”

Dollar signs began dancing through my head. The Atlantic offered him another assignment! Or maybe even a column!

“My editor told me this story is the kind of project that they often see morph into a long-form piece,” he said. “Or . . . even a book.”

My excitement exploded into a million little pieces. A book? That could take years to write. The pay was usually lousy, and that was sure to be true for a tome on a semiobscure subject. Even if Sanjay sold it for a moderate amount, it would come in a lump sum that would not provide the sort of steady income we needed. I wondered whether he had considered this, or if he was still riding an early wave of enthusiasm.

Well, I wasn’t about to bring it up. Not given that the last time he talked about writing a book, I had lit a match to his plans with a few discouraging if realistic words. Maybe in a few days I would broach the subject of finding a job that was compatible with his project. For now, I was going to support my husband.

He put the computer on the nightstand and pushed the covers off. Then he stood and stretched. “It’s the early days, but I’m going to work on getting a proposal together so I have something ready when the story’s published. And if that looks good, I’m going to go to New York and try to find an agent and sell the book. I mean, this is all if each step goes well. But I’ve been looking, and it seems to me there’s a real market for an idea like this written in a way that’s smart but commercial. It could be the start of something bigger.”

“That’s great, honey. I’m really happy for you.” And I was. I just wished he would realize that his future dreams were a tad optimistic. Even if they did materialize, they wouldn’t serve as a long-term solution to our financial woes. I could just imagine myself as a wrinkled old woman, hunched over a computer as an office cog. When would I get a turn to stay home and write?

The answer, I realized sadly, was never. Or at least not until well after both kids were done with college. Who was to say I’d even want to pen children’s books then? Admittedly, I could have carved out a few minutes at night or on the weekends and returned to one of the stories that had been swirling around in my mind for years. But that would require forgetting I was exhausted and managing to get inspired and then working even harder .

And to be honest, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to do that.

At some point Sanjay would probably get a job—I had asked him to, and he seemed serious about our project—but it was unlikely to provide a salary anywhere near mine. I was stuck, and no marriage project was going to change that simple truth.

Sanjay was grinning sheepishly again. “So . . . what do you think?”

I channeled Jenny and smiled with both my mouth and my eyes. “I think it’s great, honey. I couldn’t be happier for you if I tried.”

SIXTEEN

That Saturday I took Cecily and the kids out to dinner and a movie while Sanjay stayed home to write. At first Cecily seemed withdrawn, but by the time we were in line for tickets, she, Stevie, and Miles were giggling about fart jokes. She was still smiling when I dropped her off.

I was thrilled to see her happy—but I also knew just how fleeting that happiness could be. The nights had been the hardest for me after my mother left. Monsters and bogeymen were lurking everywhere, and in my mind my father couldn’t protect me the same way she could have (never mind that I couldn’t actually remember my mother being all that maternal). Nick crawled into my bed one evening, and the two of us continued to sleep that way until long after it was socially acceptable to do so. That didn’t stop me from staring at the dark corners of my room for hours before finally passing out from sheer exhaustion, or waking up covered in sweat in the middle of the night and calling out for someone who wasn’t there.

“How do you think Cecily’s doing?” I said to Matt after she ran inside the house.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure she was out of earshot. “I don’t really know if I can tell.”

“Why’s that?”

He shrugged, almost resigned. “I mean, she’s at camp all day during the week. Last weekend was the first weekend without Kimber, but I spent most of it filling out insurance forms.” He sighed. “There is so much paperwork . No one ever tells you that about death.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It is what it is.”

Should I push it?

I didn’t need Jenny’s voice in my head to know the right answer.

I shifted my purse on my shoulder and took a deep breath. “I’m a little worried about Cecily. She was down in the mouth at dinner.”

He was looking at me like I was dense. “Well, yeah. Her therapist said she’s going to feel horrible for a long time. She might even get depressed.” He shook his head. “Depressed, at six years old! I never thought that was something I’d have to worry about.”