After she got over the initial shock, the strangeness of knowing working artists, for years Alice and Henry seemed magic to Tess, otherworldly. Tall, lithe, gorgeous Alice. Bearded, adolescently dressed Henry. They made art and had a tiny studio in Greenpoint. They had no health insurance, no real jobs. Tess, born of and bred by devoted capitalists, could not have fathomed choices like this. She found them silly sometimes, the sort of entitlement they must have: to think they had a right to live like this. Henry more than Alice; in part, Tess thinks, because Henry’s a man, in part because Alice is half Black. Her mother, who mostly raised her, while her father worked and traveled nonstop, is white. And Alice’s mother—the way she less looks at people than appraises, the way all her sentences feel clipped in ways that suggest she is deigning to keep certain things to herself—she reminds Tess often of her own mother. Tess and Alice are separate, different, from their husbands and their family, because they weren’t loved and coddled, nurtured, the way Martin and his siblings always were.

The year Tess stopped talking to her mother—because she finally decided that it wasn’t worth it, because she was too exhausted to keep trying, to prove she was not the sort of person who might break her parents’ hearts—was the year Stella was born. She had a baby and a toddler. Henry would come pick up her and Stella from their apartment. Helen had come to stay with them for four weeks to help out but had had to fly back home for work. Tess’s firm was ruthless, tough, but also, three of the partners were mothers, and all the women were given four months paid leave. Martin was in his last stretch of applying for tenure and was uptown at work more than he’d ever been. Tess was home alone all day and—though no one ever would have thought it; though the house was perfect every night, the dinner cooked (though pre-prepared by Martin), the rooms ordered, clean; though she checked in daily with the office; and though Stella nursed well and napped for long stretches and they had a nanny part-time for Colin—she’d still thought, in those four months, that she might go insane.