If you could afford it, sometimes you could let yourself be taken in a little bit to get some peace of mind. And now, she thought with a thrilling glow, she could afford it.

“Hey, what’s up with you?” Whitney asked, giving Amara a gentle nudge. She tried not to have favorites in playgroup, but still, Amara was the one she wanted to sit next to, the one she’d trusted with things she didn’t tell the rest of the women.

“I didn’t get to weigh in on Claire,” Amara said through her teeth as she smiled for another photo.

“Oh, sorry!” Whitney said. “I guess you were still in the bathroom. She’ll be great, though.”

“I think we could do better.”

“But you said she had a beautiful voice,” Whitney said, angling her face up for the camera so that there was no chance Gwen would catch a hint of double chin. Claire would be a much better musician for them than Joey had been. With his boundless confidence and shameless flirting, Joey had introduced a new competitive element to playgroup. Without meaning to, they’d all started jockeying for his attention, little resentments building when Joey spent the whole playgroup teasing Meredith or complimenting Amara, the only one of them who didn’t seem to blush under his focus. Whitney was amazed by how stupid they all became, like preteen girls at a school dance. She had been quietly thrilled when Ellie told them about the bachelorette party incident so they’d had an excuse to go back to being the grown-ups they actually were.

Yes, Claire would be better, with her coppery hair and her slightly skittish manner. She seemed sweet. Whitney wanted to pet her, to protect her.

(Later, Whitney would realize how blind she’d been. Claire would change things between the playgroup women more than Joey ever could have.)

“I liked her a lot,” she said. “And everyone else was in favor.”

“Well, you still should have asked me,” Amara said.

“Okay, someone’s got a bug up her butt today,” Whitney said, and immediately felt guilty for snapping.

“Yup,” Amara said, stone-faced. “There’s a large praying mantis burrowing its way into my ass.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter, right as Gwen took a final picture.

When everyone else left and Whitney looked through the pictures later, that was the magic one. They all glowed, Whitney and Amara especially. “#Wellness and wine with my favorite mamas at playgroup is the best #selfcare,” Whitney typed quickly, adding in a few more hashtags and posting the photo and caption online. Then she gathered Hope up in her arms and settled with her on the couch. Hope was toddling about, but she still couldn’t walk more than a few feet without flopping back down, and Whitney was grateful for that. “Not yet, rug rat,” Whitney said, rubbing her nose against her baby’s cheek, and Hope let out a contented sigh, relaxing against her mother’s chest. Soon she fell asleep. Whitney didn’t. Whitney had been having a hard time sleeping lately.

She could put Hope into her crib and close the door for some private time, but no, the baby was too sweet to move. So she rested her head back on one of the throw pillows and looked up at the ceiling, then out the windows. “Hellooo,” she whispered, her voice arcing up toward the light fixture above. Not even in her wildest dreams had she imagined that she’d live in all this space.

* * *

—

When Whitney was a little girl, she had hated her house. It was the smallest one on the block, and in between the deep red brick of the Kellys’ on one side and the gray stone of the Silvermans’ on the other, the beige siding of the McNabs’ looked hopelessly plain.

But once a year, Whitney loved where she lived. On December first, her father would go to the shed out back as dusk started to roll in and return with his arms full of lights. He’d set up a ladder and ask Whitney to hold the bottom, and she would stand there like a proper sentinel, making sure he didn’t fall off while he strung and hammered. An hour later, their house would be a glowing galaxy, threaded with little colored stars. The Kellys only put up one string of white lights. The Silvermans were Jewish, so they didn’t put up anything.

As the years went on, the galaxy expanded. Her mother would roll her eyes, but then her mother rolled her eyes at pretty much everything her father did. Her father, egged on by Whitney’s evident delight, bought a life-sized inflatable Santa who swayed in the wind like he was overcome with Christmas spirit. The next year, a Rudolph joined him. (“How about putting that money toward the weekend in the Poconos you’re always promising me?” Whitney heard her mother hiss at her father one night.) The year Mrs. Hollinger started leading the church choir, her father suddenly got much more interested in religion and added a glowing plastic nativity scene in one corner of the yard. The Virgin Mary’s face was so soft and sweet, like Mrs. Hollinger’s. For a time, Whitney’s regular games of pretending that she was Christine Daaé from The Phantom of the Opera or a beautiful maiden whisked away to a better life by a lovestruck prince gave way to a new hobby, in which Whitney looked at Mary’s expression and then tried to replicate it in the mirror in her room, pretending a scarf-wrapped teddy bear was the Baby Jesus. She’d look down at the bear, her eyelashes fluttering, and try to turn the love from her eyes into something solid that could be felt by the recipient like a warm blanket. She was very pretty in those moments, she could see whenever she snuck a glance back up at the mirror, and she imagined the assembled shepherds and wisemen looking at her and her teddy bear Jesus baby in awe, all of them wanting to protect her, to marry her, to possess her. (She did not yet understand that being a mother generally made a woman less desirable, not more.)

The year Whitney turned thirteen was a confusing one, in which she became suddenly, achingly aware of everything that was wrong with her. Her boobs were too small, and then they were too big, causing older men to show her a new kind of attention. She was too quiet, except when she was too loud. She was too fat. (She was never too thin.) But when December first rolled around, her father added a motion-activated inflatable snow globe that played a tinkling version of “Holly Jolly Christmas” when people walked by, and things were simple again. She and her father pretended to be ninjas and tried to sneak up the front porch steps without setting off the snow globe, but no matter how slowly they moved, it started vibrating with its merry tune, causing them to abandon their ninja pretense and dance around, shout-singing along.

A week later, Whitney got a ride home from choir practice with Alicia, who went to the private prep school a ten-minute drive from Whitney’s public junior high. Alicia was the unofficial leader of the alto section, the one who could keep up the difficult harmonies without trying. During snack time, as the other kids wolfed down Doritos, Alicia took out a Ziploc bag of celery sticks and ate them carefully. She always reapplied her pink lip gloss in the bathroom after they’d finished singing, before reentering the world.