She was flushed, and I could tell she was panicking. I was sort of panicking too. How would it even be possible to not have our phones at night? I thought, idiotically, How will I keep up with Growing with Grace’s reels? But, well, now that I was sitting across the table from her, I guessed that was kind of a moot point. “Sweetheart,” I said soothingly, “let’s just hear Alice out.”

“Well, that’s really it,” Alice said. “The average American child won’t have the attention span to read a book by the time he or she is thirty-five. I won’t contribute to that.”

That really was horrifying. And I had read all those studies about social media contributing to unhappiness and depression in girls. Maybe I just hadn’t been brave enough to take Iris’s phone; I guess I’d reasoned that, if she didn’t have a phone, she couldn’t communicate and how would she have any friends? And wouldn’t having no friends contribute to unhappiness and depression too?

“Okay,” I said. “But, just playing devil’s advocate, since I’m looking for a job, I might need to return emails or take phone calls in the evenings.”

“There is a phone in every room,” Alice said. “It used to be a B&B, after all. You just click on a new line if you want to talk. And computers are allowed. Just not the scrolling time-suck of cell phones.”

I was telling myself that I was a grown woman and Alice wasn’t my mother. She couldn’t make me give up my phone. Then again, was it normal or healthy for me to feel this panicked by the idea of not being attached to a device for a few hours a night?

“We go out on the beach at night!” Brenna said with such seven-year-old enthusiasm that I thought I might cry.

“Yeah!” Jamie chimed in. “So we can see the moon and the stars.”

“It really isn’t bad once you get used to it,” Julie said.

“You feel sort of… free,” Grace added.

Free. When was the last time I’d felt free? And, come on, Grace had almost a million followers. If she could separate from her phone, surely I could too.

I pinned on a semifake smile and shot my daughter a look across the table as I said, “Well, then, we will adjust.”

“It seriously only takes like a week to get used to it,” Merit said. He grinned at Iris.

She grinned back. “Well, if you can do it, I can do it.”

Grace caught my eye and shook her head. I knew what she was thinking: we might be in dangerous territory.