“Do you want to talk about it?” Claire asked.

“No. What I want is for you to play me a song. So are you going to or not?”

Amara was sitting up ramrod straight, a wry twist to her mouth, drumming her fingers on her knee, and Claire knew how the movie version of this moment went—she picked up her guitar and sang something beautiful and revealing and true (while the camera slowly zoomed in on her face), and Amara loved it and called up all her entertainment-industry contacts right then and there. But Claire didn’t have a song to play. She’d written snatches of lyrics back in the good Vagabond days and helped Marcus refine his ideas, but she had nothing full to call her own. She’d sat around pitying herself, only to be wildly unprepared when opportunity arose. “I can’t yet,” she said. “But can I let you know when I’m ready?”

The wry twist disappeared from Amara’s mouth. “Yes,” she said. “But, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, don’t wait forever to get your shit together, all right? Life only gives you so many chances.”

Chapter 11

It was important to engage in a little self-care when you were a mother, Whitney told herself, as she handed Hope to the moonfaced Hunter College student she’d hired to babysit. “I’ll only be a couple of hours. I’m just going to do a few errands and get a massage,” she said, and bent down to put her heels on. But in unfamiliar arms, Hope reached out a dimpled hand to her mother and her face began to crumple.

“Ma! Ma!” Hope cried.

Was there any worse sound than your child wailing your name? A wave of guilt crashed over Whitney. “Oh, no,” she said, her arms automatically reaching to take Hope back.

“We’ll be fine!” the babysitter said, cheerful as a flight attendant during turbulence, so Whitney let her arms drop back down to her sides, where they hung, restless.

“You’ve got the emergency numbers—”

“Yes.”

“And you know she might be allergic to nuts, so we just steer clear of them—”

“Right.”

“And you’re certified in baby CPR.”

“I am,” the girl said. “Don’t worry. Just go! Enjoy your ‘me’ time!”

In the taxi, Whitney’s feet began to sweat. She pushed her shoes half off so that they dangled on her toes, trying to air out while avoiding the dusty floor of the cab. She took off one heel entirely, pretending to examine it, and gave it a discreet sniff, as the driver answered her questions about how long he’d been in the United States (nineteen years), what his children were studying (medicine for the girl; the boy couldn’t decide yet). The lining of the shoe smelled sour and old, an unshakable record of every time she’d perspired.

She told the driver to drop her off in front of a shoe store. Despite having only a few minutes before her appointment (and when your baby was in the service of a babysitter, every moment counted), she tried on a pair of nude heels in a size seven. The fabric was cool against her skin, exuding that contagious new shoe smell, so she bought the heels, throwing her old shoes in her purse. Then she walked the remaining block to the Windom Hotel and Spa on East Forty-Seventh Street and Second Avenue, breaking the shoes in, feeling where a blister would form on her heel but not yet, not today.

The hotel had recently undergone a renovation, opening what online buzz said was one of the best spas in that area, even if not too many people knew about it yet. She pushed her way around the revolving door and into the calm, hushed lobby. Reception desk to the left, spa entrance to the right. She looked at the suite number on her phone and took the elevator straight up.

On the eighth floor, she walked to room 811, her heels leaving little impressions on the hallway carpet. She hesitated before knocking. It wasn’t too late to turn around, to keep all of this relegated to a fantasy, to greet Grant when he came home from work that night with a clear conscience. To let him turn to her in the darkness after Hope had fallen asleep and try for a few long minutes to get her off efficiently, like she was a piece of furniture he was trying to assemble and the damn instructions weren’t clear. To tell him again that it wasn’t going to happen for her that night and that he shouldn’t worry. To let him jerk back and forth above her while both of them kept their eyes closed, him thinking about who knows what, her thinking about the man inside room 811.

She knocked on the door. When Christopher answered, he looked at her as if she were already naked. “I didn’t know if you’d come,” he said, a smile curling on his face. The room behind him was beautiful without being extravagant. The duvet had a crease in it where he’d sat to wait.

“I didn’t either.” Her voice came out girlish, small somehow. She wondered if Hope had stopped calling after her.

After that playgroup when Grant had been so rigid and embarrassing, when she’d posted that picture of herself and Hope at Gwen’s piano, Whitney got a direct message: I see you made a visit to the museum today. It was signed –An Exhibit. Her heart skipped around in her chest. Some resolve inside of her crumbled. She answered back.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said now to Christopher, and he reached out, looping his finger around the belt on her waist.

“Whit. Let’s not do this part,” he said. “Where we have to convince each other. We already know.”

So she nodded, stepped forward, and followed Christopher inside.

Chapter 12

Over the weekend, Claire sat down to write something beautiful and revealing and true. She turned off her phone and put it in the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror. “Stop being a waste of space,” she told her reflection. She lit a fucking candle.

And then she sprawled on the floor with her guitar on her lap. She was going to contemplate life, digging Grand Canyon deep into her soul. Something came to her as she stared at the sputtering candle, an idea about embers in December (a spark in them yet, despite their regret), and she spent a half hour setting it to music before realizing that it was sentimental bullshit. Also, embers couldn’t feel regret. She couldn’t anthropomorphize embers. She didn’t work for Pixar.

Then she tried something about Quinton. Maybe there was a moment in that relationship, an instant when she had felt very deeply that she loved him. That one late night at his apartment, after they’d had sex, when they’d gone to the kitchen to look for a midnight snack, and barelegged and giddy, they’d danced around eating peanut butter in the light from the refrigerator. She sang a makeshift chorus. She pictured Amara listening to it, scorn curling around her lips. Claire had an urge to smash her guitar into a thousand tiny wood shards and to exile herself to Antarctica. Forget digging canyon deep. It was more like jabbing a shovel into concrete over and over again. What a terrible feeling it was, to sift through your heart and guts and soul and to come up short.