I’d been asked to put William to bed and then stay the night. It was the first but not the last time I’d sleep over, their house gradually becoming more familiar to me than my own austere apartment. At that point I’d been William’s nanny for two weeks. He was an easy baby, though I was rarely off by four and Lonnie was rarely writing in the big office opposite the master bedroom. There were lunches with friends, shopping, manicures, waxes, and an endless stream of doctor’s appointments. I’d been raised in a family without health insurance; I went to a doctor only if I was very sick. Lonnie had screenings for everything imaginable as well as acupuncture and massages for stress.

Though all the appointments seemed unnecessary, in fact I understood what it was like to fill a whole day up with nothing much. I was a single woman. On weekends, I slept late, I took long baths any time of day I felt like it, I read books, I watched meandering foreign films, I would sometimes spend an hour masturbating—not even watching porn, just lying there, trying to think of nothing but the sensation like some kind of meditative exercise. If I had something specific to do but no time frame in which to do it, like clean the house, I could make the activity take all day—doing a little, then turning on an episode of something on my laptop, sitting down to watch for a while, doing a little more, stopping to eat something, watching another episode, making tea, having a snack, and so on. As an adult one didn’t get bored. Or rather, one got bored only at work.

I spent a long time carrying William around that party, trying to look like I was having a good time. When people surrounded us, he dug his little nails into my shoulders with fear but kept an uncomfortable smile on his face that everyone found very winning.

“Look at this skinny baby! Lonnie, you’re so lucky he’s so skinny!”

“He’s tall too, look how tall he is!”

Lonnie mixed drinks at the gold bar cart in the corner of the living room. She’d dressed in front of me. I tried not to look at the glow of her skin, but it was impossible to stop my eyes from following her as she paced naked around her bedroom, digging through piles of clothing. She had a light stretch mark that ran from her navel to the dark patch of neatly trimmed pubic hair, the only evidence that William was indeed her own.