Reluctantly, she turned off the water, then rolled her head from side to side, her muscles sore from going to a Barre class with the moms after playgroup the day before. The studio had been running a special where, for an extra twenty dollars on top of the forty-five-dollar class fee, women could drop off their babies with some childcare experts in one room and then squat and shake for an hour in the room next door. Whitney had invited Claire along, lending her more fancy workout clothes, plunking down her credit card and waving off Claire’s halfhearted offer to pay for herself. So Claire had hoisted her leg up onto a ballet bar and stretched until muscles that she didn’t even know she had burned. When they’d all walked out of class together, Claire’s body had quivered with exhaustion but also with something else, a kind of rush from being part of their joking, sweaty clan.

Now she stepped out of the shower and checked the baby monitor. Charlie was still sleeping. She had plenty of time before Amara and Daniel were supposed to come home. She toweled off, then ran her fingers over a satin lavender robe hanging on a hook next to the towels.

God, it was soft. She stared at it, a longing blossoming in her chest. It couldn’t hurt to try it on, just for a minute.

She shrugged it over her shoulders and belted it around her waist, then stared at herself in the mirror. She looked sexy, but classy sexy, like an old-time movie star in a seduction scene.

“Hello,” she purred at her reflection. “Welcome to my penthouse apartment.” She pursed her lips and pushed out her breasts, then laughed at herself. Her eyes lit on a shelf of Amara’s beauty products, lined up in straight rows like French schoolchildren. Some, like the fancy vitamins, were clearly recommended by the playgroup women. They practically screamed, “EXPENSIVE ALL-NATURAL BULLSHIT.” Others, like the cocoa butter, she could safely assume that none of the other playgroup women had tried.

Staring at all the costly-looking products, Claire wondered if Amara had pilfered any of them, if she’d gone into some organic beauty store and slipped a ninety-nine-dollar bottle of hand lotion into her pocket when no one was looking. Then she thought about the Sisyphean life Amara had been leading for the past year—calming Charlie down, changing his diaper, and then doing it all over again, every day, and all without earning any money to fully call her own. No wonder she needed to steal the occasional luxury item to stay sane. If Claire were in that situation, she would probably have to start robbing banks. It no longer mattered to Claire what Amara had been doing in Whitney’s office, she realized. She trusted her.

And sure, maybe these women went a little overboard with the wellness routines, but now, with the vast array of Amara’s products stretched out in front of her like a mountain range and with the experience of Sycamore House lingering in her mind, Claire started to understand the appeal. She had never really been a fancy-lotion kind of person, but if she were, would her life be any different? Would the world be kinder to her if she spent half an hour every morning applying various creams and makeup? Would she glow like the playgroup women and give off an aura of money that made people want to give her more? (After all, money was like bunnies—once you had a certain amount of hundreds in your wallet, they just kept multiplying. Either people respected you and gave you opportunities that led to more money, or you put it in the stock market, sat back, and watched it give birth over and over again.)

She hadn’t taken particularly good care of herself on the road with Vagabond. She’d shoveled down pizza and beer most nights along with the rest of the guys, and bathed a bit less than she should have, and hurriedly slicked on red lipstick for only the important shows. If she’d had the energy to go for a run each morning while the guys slept in, to put an array of products into her hair and onto her skin, maybe Marlena wouldn’t have been able to march in and usurp her so easily. Maybe Claire would have fascinated the guys enough, and they would’ve stayed loyal.

Or maybe nothing would have changed. But in this particular moment, it was tempting to try on a Whitney-and-Amara kind of life, to pretend that she wasn’t messy, flawed, exhausted by the world. To imagine that a new and content Claire could rise up from the discarded parts of the old one, that people could be awed by her. Help yourself to anything, she thought, and squeezed a pump of “skin-repairing” eucalyptus lotion onto her palm.

She made her way down the line with the growing excitement of a child snooping in her mother’s jewelry box. Humming to herself, she put on a drop of hair oil to stop her frizz and rubbed her cheeks with exfoliating cream that smelled like the sea and billed itself as “a facial in a jar.”

“Luminous skin? Me?” she said to her reflection. “Oh, you’re too sweet. I just woke up like this.” She came to the TrueMommy supplements and popped one into her mouth. “Why, yes, I did just give birth a day ago,” she said. “But of course I’ll be on the cover of your fashion magazine. What? No photoshopping necessary? If you say so!”

As the vitamin made its way into her system, she half-expected an instant transformation, like when she went to the gym for half an hour and then checked her stomach for a six-pack. But the same old Claire stared back at her in the mirror. She screwed the cap back onto the supplement jar and kept making her way down the line.

Instant transformations weren’t possible, but she could take better care of herself. Maybe this silly playing around in Amara’s beauty supplies could be the start of a new phase, of becoming a woman instead of some liminal creature still acting like a girl. She just needed some discipline, like the playgroup women had.

Then a thought hit her, and her heart started to race. These TrueMommy things were expensive. Did Amara count them? What if she noticed that she’d come up short at the end of the cycle and realized that Claire had taken one?

No, Amara would probably blame the manufacturer. Or even if she figured out Claire had taken one somehow, she might think it was weird, but she wouldn’t hate her for it. It was just a fucking vitamin. Claire could buy her a whole bottle of Flintstone Gummies to make up for it. But none of her rationalizations made her heart slow down. It raced even faster, weirdly so, in a way that she’d felt before, although not recently. She put her palm on her chest and felt the kicking pulse. And then Claire’s stomach dropped.

She’d done a fair amount of drugs in her day. She had been in a band, after all. Thanks to a series of long, hazy nights with the Vagabond crew, she knew the unpredictable beauty of acid, the drowsy pull of pot, the glorious kick of cocaine. Marcus had managed to get a prescription for Adderall, and sometimes they dug into it on long days when they wanted to be extra-productive with rehearsals.

And this “vitamin” working its way through her system was no all-natural supplement. It was straight-up speed.

Chapter 19

Amara sat at a corner table at Les Trois Cochons and swirled her pinot noir around in her glass. What the fuck was taking Daniel so long? She had sprinted half the way to the upscale French bistro after foisting off Charlie when he was not in a state to be left so that she wouldn’t be more than a few minutes late for their date night, and now, ten minutes later, she was still sitting here alone while a disdainful, helium-voiced waitress hovered, asking if there was anything she could get her while she waited. Elderly Upper East Side couples cut into their steaks, Édith Piaf played in the background, and the smell of onions wafted out from the kitchen. Amara took a big sip of wine, trying to push away her annoyance. She didn’t want the night to be ruined before it even began.