“Is that your brother?” Claire asked, and Gwen nodded. “What does he do?”

Gwen bit her lip, hesitating. “He’s . . . he’s between things at the moment. He hasn’t been well lately.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Claire said, and Gwen gave her a small, sad smile.

“Stop!” Ellie shrieked, looking at a different picture. “Wait. This is Christopher? Gwen, your husband is a fox!”

“Um, yes, please!” Meredith said, fanning her face.

Claire leaned toward the picture in question, propped up next to a couple of framed photos of the children—Gwen in a wedding dress, a man in a tuxedo with his arm slung around her. Yup, “fox” was accurate. He wasn’t conventionally handsome—no Ken doll for Gwen. Somehow that made him more attractive. He had curling, glinting hair that fell over his forehead, a prominent nose, big, wild eyebrows. Nothing about him was pretty. He was probably amazing in bed.

Hey, good for Gwen.

“If I’d known you all were coming over, I’d have gotten some more appropriate snacks. Just keep the cherries away from the babies,” Gwen was saying as she passed around the gorgeous plate of fruit. “Because of the pits.”

“You should definitely take a picture for your Insta here, Whitney,” Meredith said.

“No, no,” Whitney said. “I don’t want to put a picture of Gwen’s house online if she doesn’t feel comfortable with photos.”

“Oh, gosh,” Gwen said. “Well, as long as you don’t put my address in the caption, I suppose it’s fine. Maybe by the piano? Unless it’s too dark over there.”

Amara appeared at Claire’s side. “Gwen’s cousin put a picture of her kid online, and it got used on a child porn site,” she explained in a low voice as they watched the other women gather around the piano bench. Whitney sat down with Hope in her lap.

“Yikes,” Claire said back. In the sudden, blinding flash of the camera, Whitney pressed Hope’s tiny fists against the piano keys and smiled.

Chapter 8

Hot with embarrassment and shame, Whitney blinked a few times. Where was Amara? Over in a corner whispering with Claire, of all people. Whitney took some deep breaths, trying to will herself into a kind of meditation, to be at peace, even as Ellie and Meredith crowded around the photo that Gwen had just taken and declared it to be beautiful.

Whitney wanted to be generous and kind. She wanted to be the woman on her Instagram—her best self, whose most confessional transgressions were Today I got a little grumpy with Hope or Sometimes I wish I could sleep for a million years! She wanted to focus on her daughter and not worry about whether or not the rest of the playgroup women were making soft, snide remarks to one another about her marriage. She wanted to slap the self-satisfied smirk off of Gwen’s face and then get the hell out of her brownstone, back to where she was less likely to make decisions that could completely upend the careful curation of her life.

She’d told herself, after Gwen’s Christmas party, that she was never going to come back here. Arrogant, self-involved Grant had no idea what he’d done.

* * *

—

Gwen’s Christmas party had been the first nonparenting-related social event that Whitney had attended since Hope’s birth. She and Grant hired a teenage girl who lived on the fifth floor of their building and paid her an exorbitant amount to sit in front of their TV while Hope slept, even though the girl’s allowance was probably more than Whitney’s mother had earned as a dental hygienist. (But there was a bonus. The girl came with reinforcements: her parents a mere elevator ride away if Hope wouldn’t stop crying and the girl panicked.)

Whitney loved Christmas in New York. Perhaps real New Yorkers grew to resent the decorated department store windows drawing Midwesterners like moths, but her trashy-tourist heart loved them and always would. She pictured taking Hope downtown to see them when she was a little older and could appreciate them, both of them gaping in delight at the animatronics display, then wending their way over to the Bryant Park holiday market, taking bites of warm Nutella-filled crepes, watching the ice-skaters in the shadow of the Christmas tree.

She’d been so excited for the party, even asking Grant if he would watch Hope one weekend afternoon so that she could go out and buy a new dress. The first experience of shopping for a pretty outfit post-baby was a dispiriting one. Her body translated into new, nonstretchy clothes in all sorts of unflattering ways, the dressing room mirrors specially designed to highlight her stretch marks and lumps, as well as the fine lines just starting to make their way across her forehead. She’d always disdained those women with too-taut faces—she’d prefer to age gracefully!—but then she’d actually started aging. Now, as she looked at herself, she wondered if it was possible to find an understated plastic surgeon, someone who could help her maintain herself with an infinitely subtle hand.

Finally, though, she found a red dress, with an Empire waist that camouflaged the fact that her stomach still pooched out in a way she hated (she wanted to lose that final bit of weight, but leaving the house to exercise took energy she couldn’t seem to muster) and a low lace bodice that emphasized the one part of her body that she actually liked better now.

She took her time getting ready for the Christmas party, even though putting Hope down took longer than anticipated. She wanted to make Grant’s eyes light up when he saw her all dressed up again, the way they had prepregnancy, when they’d spun from the latest new downtown restaurants to weekend getaways and back again. Perhaps tonight could be a kind of reset for them—a chance to feel romantic after so many months of changing poopy diapers, after the disappointing birthday dinner, after the recent sleep-schedule debacle when he’d snapped at her that Hope was fine and she should stop staring at the video baby monitor.

But when Whitney made her grand entrance from the bathroom, Grant just glanced at her. “We finally ready to go?” he asked, clearly annoyed that he’d had to entertain the babysitter all by himself. He didn’t say anything at all about the new dress.

She’d realized, soon after meeting him, that Grant could be a jerk. But there were benefits to being with someone who didn’t make nice all the time. He was a jerk to people on her behalf so that she never had to be, so that she could be the one to smile at the waiter who had messed up her order while Grant instilled the fear of God in him. She could relax in their beautiful apartment, for which he’d done all the tough negotiating.

And, most important, he wasn’t a jerk to her. He treated her like she was a precious thing, like she had proven herself worthy of more from him. Back before he’d proposed, she’d worried that things might change when she introduced him to her parents, and so she’d held off as long as possible, still making excuses months after she’d met his family over dinner at Jean-Georges. (“Our treat, of course,” Grant’s father had said, putting down his card like the thousand-dollar meal was nothing.) When Whitney had finally taken Grant to her childhood home, they’d suffered through an awkward dinner during which her mom served oversalted meat loaf and her dad reeked of stale beer. She’d turned to Grant in the car afterward, expecting a new hint of disgust in his eyes. But instead, he stroked her face. “Whitney, you are a marvel,” he said, and she saw that her humble beginnings had only made her more precious to him, like she was a pearl that someone had accidentally dropped in a ditch, and Grant could help her reach the place where she truly belonged. She’d thought things would stay like that forever.