“No. I’m not a masochist.” She washed the leeks, and then the mushrooms, splashing water everywhere. “I looked a couple of times at the beginning and it made me feel bad about myself, so I stopped.”

“Why did it make you feel bad?”

“All the usual reasons. She’s twenty-five. Successful. Skinny. Blonde. Your average nightmare. And she runs her own business. And she’s fun, apparently.” She heard the hurt in her own voice. “A whole lot of fun. Unlike me, who is officially boring and also a martyr, according to Richard.” She lined up the leeks and chopped them so quickly that Nicole drew breath.

“I’m not sure if this is helping your stress levels, but it’s definitely not helping mine. You know I’m not good with blood.”

“I have excellent knife skills. I may be no fun, but I can chop a leek.”

“Okay.” Nicole was calm. “Am I allowed to point out that you’re also fun and run your own business?”

“I inherited my business.”

“Which you have successfully grown into an aspirational destination through a mixture of extreme hard work and ingenuity.”

It was true, so why didn’t hearing it said aloud lift her mood?

“Maybe. But holding it all together requires a poise that eludes me.” She sloshed olive oil into a pan and started to fry the leeks. “In every one of Avery’s social media posts she looks calm and together, as if an anxious thought has never entered her head. The sky behind her is always blue. It has been raining nonstop here for months, but somehow the sun shows up for her. Her life looked so perfect, and mine was—is—such an imperfect mess.” She pushed the leeks around the pan, waiting for them to soften. “Ignore me. I’m angry, upset and worried about Zoe. Let’s talk about you. I want to talk about you and Justin and the baby.”

“Later,” Nicole said. “First let’s address the whole social media thing. You do know it’s all fake? That’s the whole point of social media, at least for someone like Avery. She’s trying to persuade the people watching that she has a perfect life and if they subscribe to her app or show up at her classes, then they too can have a life like hers. It’s not about truth, it’s about building an audience. She is showing them a life they can aspire to. It’s no more real than a movie.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m uniquely qualified to know it. Let me show you something.” Nicole grabbed her phone from the pocket of her yoga pants and started to scroll. “Look. Tell me what you see.”