This was exactly how she’d felt in the beginning of Vagabond. She and Marcus had met teaching music classes together, at that bouncy, corporate children’s entertainment company she’d worked at when she first moved to New York. Their voices blended well, and they made each other laugh by improvising banter that wasn’t in the class script. So when he’d asked her to join the new band he was starting, she’d come into their first practice bursting with song ideas, snatches of lyrics and melodies. But he had dismissed them all, saying, “Okay, Jesus Girl. Did you ever listen to anything besides Christian rock?”

She laid her head back onto her mattress and reached for her computer, balancing it on her stomach, ready to numb out on the always available drug of the Internet and temporarily forget how disappointed she was in herself. (Even though, like alcohol, using the Internet to forget your troubles often left you feeling terribly hungover and worse than before.) After a quick scan of Twitter and New York magazine, she remembered Whitney’s social media and pulled it up.

Holy shit, she had almost fifty thousand followers on Twitter and nearly twice that on Instagram. Whitney had always been so modest about it, Claire hadn’t realized she’d reached that level of social media fame. Scrolling through, though, she could see why it was taking off. First of all, no surprise, Whitney photographed extremely well. She was stunning in real life, of course, but maybe even more luminous in the camera’s eye. And second, the photos she chose were pure visual candy, showing a world in which families only ever delighted in one another, the playgroup was a team of beautiful women who took care of themselves and their friends in equal measure, and Whitney and Hope made a perfect mother-daughter pair whether they were riding a carousel, drinking smoothies, or doing Mommy-and-me yoga poses, the photo captions inevitably sprinkled with “wellness” or “self-care.” Whitney modeled a new kind of motherhood in which a woman could be gorgeous and empowered and selfless at the same time, all without breaking a sweat.

Claire Gchatted the link to Thea, who had made it clear that she expected regular updates on all the playgroup gossip, and went back to the Instagram, stopping at a picture of Whitney tickling Hope on her lap. God, had her own mother ever looked at her like that, with such pure love? Given the way they’d fallen out with each other over Thea when Claire was in high school, and the awkwardness of their dutiful, twice-monthly phone calls now, Claire doubted it.

Her Gchat beeped with a message from Thea. Oh, shit, she wrote. Whitney Morgan is Whitney McNab? We took an art history class together my sophomore year.

Those maiden names will get ya, Claire wrote back as she continued to click through, reading the comments on the picture Whitney had taken of her with her guitar, surrounded by the babies. People loved it! What was this weird, positive, rainbow-sparkle corner of the Internet where the comments section was just people saying how beautiful you were instead of trolls calling you a cunt?

I’m sure she doesn’t know who I am, Thea wrote. Obviously I had a crush on her. Also obviously I never spoke to her.

Claire smiled at that, and then at Whitney’s most recent picture, of Whitney sprawled on the floor on her stomach, laughing, while Hope propped herself up on Whitney’s back. DIY alert! Whitney had written in the caption. Pro tip: If a little, lovable tyrant demands all of your time and you haven’t been able to get a massage in ages, trick the tiny dictator into becoming your masseuse. Sure, her technique may not be perfect, but I’d still highly recommend. The comments for that one were filled with LOLs and laughing emojis.

This is propaganda, Thea wrote. Now I want a baby.

Bahaha, Claire wrote back, and kept on clicking.

A picture of all the playgroup women, accompanied by a sentimental caption—These women are my rocks. Parenting can be exhausting, and there’s no calling in sick. But my playgroup ladies always show up, and thank goodness for that—had prompted a slew of comments calling them “inspirational.”

It was all a little silly, Claire thought, not to mention privileged up the wazoo. The “self-care” Whitney touted wasn’t available to people like Claire, who couldn’t shell out thousands of dollars to relax, who had to make themselves feel better in more makeshift ways that often backfired. (A fancy spa day never left you with a condom floating inside your body, for example.)

But also, maybe these women were inspirational. They didn’t decide they felt like bad mothers and give up on parenting to numb out online. They didn’t mope around in self-pity. They showed up. Oh, God, Claire thought with a mix of surprise and dismay, she really liked them all. They had invited her in and somehow become the highlight of her week, something entirely different from the other gigs (occasional catering, a part-time job at a clothing store) that she’d been picking up recently. They brought . . . color back into her life.

She put the computer aside, as their faces swam in her mind, looking at her with that maternal warmth and encouragement they gave so well.

Then she got up and tried to write something else.

* * *

—

Claire came to Tuesday’s playgroup on a mission to get to Amara. But when she arrived, the moms were all preoccupied by a juice cleanse they were doing together, a weird, cranky energy pervading the room. Instead of sipping on wine and nibbling fruit and dark chocolate like normal, they clutched little bottles full of dark green liquid, taking delicate swallows.

When they explained that they’d ingested nothing but this specialty juice for two days straight (Each day’s mixture had a ton of nutrients! They started in the mornings with purified water, cayenne, agave, and lemon, moved on to cold-pressed kale and cucumber, and ended the day with raw cashew milk!), Claire made the mistake of calling it a diet, and they all laughed too brightly and shook their heads, almost in unison. “It’s a cleanse,” Meredith said.

“Yeah, we’re just getting rid of the toxins you build up by living in the world,” said Ellie. “Resetting and starting out the week with a clean, healthy slate.”

“Honestly, it feels amazing,” Whitney said.

Amara rolled her eyes. “Really incredible.”

Could a person get addicted to wellness like cocaine and have to keep doing more and more to get the same high? Pretty soon the moms would be injecting collagen straight into one another’s asses and insisting that they’d never felt better.

Claire went to pull her guitar out of its case and caught Amara’s eye, but then Ellie decided to show off her new scarf, a shimmery scarlet thing that fluttered like a leaf in the wind, and the moms all gathered to ooh and ahh.

“It’s Hermès,” Ellie said. “Thank you, wife bonus!”

Amara blanched. “‘Wife bonus’? Oh, please, God, no. Ellie, you’re not John’s employee.”

“I’m not?” Ellie widened her eyes, then waved her hand through the air, her tone turning snippy. “Obviously I know that. But I work as hard as he does for no salary, so I think it’s a nice gesture if he wants to reward me for everything I’ve done by setting aside some money reserved especially for me.”