My phone pinged. I reached for it on the floor. It was an email from my mother: “Dinner.” My anxiety whooshed into flame, as it did every Saturday, when I agonized over whether to attend. When I was in middle school, my parents had switched from date nights out to hosting dinners in our apartment, and had kept up the tradition for the past decade, more or less. For a time, their friends’ children had come, but one by one they’d grown up, and now there was just me. I’d forgone a party with my teacher colleagues to attend the weekend before, when my parents’ guests had included a new associate, a Dr. Langham, a tree trunk of a man with a thick black mustache. He had recently gotten divorced, falling from virtuous expert to failed husband. I wondered if my parents had invited him as a show of magnanimity. It felt to me like an alignment: we were two unbelongings.

In the middle of dinner, during a tense conversation about borderline personality disorder, I’d taken a prolonged break in the bathroom. When I came out, Lang-ham was perusing the bookcase outside my parents’ bedroom. We had been seated across from each other at the table and had been flicking our eyes at each other all night. His shoulders were broad as a woolly mammoth’s beneath his blazer. His face had grown meaty with age, he looked older than my father, but I could still make out the handsome bone structure underneath. I walked over and turned toward the bookshelves, too.

“Rough crowd,” he said.

“Right?” I said, and then felt embarrassed. I tried again: “I’m sorry about your divorce.”

“Thank you,” he said, and turned his face toward mine.

My throat tightened, and I found myself unable to look in his direction. Was it his shoulders, the heat emanating from his heft, the shadow of his body on the bookcase, the memory of us glancing at each other across the table? I stared at the books instead: there, to the left, was the volume in which I had investigated, as a child, the disorder of one of my father’s clients. My parents had often spoken of their clients in front of me, referring to them with code names, as if they were spies on a mission. I sat still in these moments, not daring to move for fear they’d remember I was there and stop speaking. This particular woman—Client Ζ was her code name—had graduated from college not long before and was bulimic. One day, when my parents were both working in their office, the apartment next door to ours, I’d taken down a psychology book to look up what this meant. Boo-lee-mick, boo-li-mick, bu-lee-mick. It meant that Client Ζ ate a lot of food, then made herself throw it back up, over and over again. This was disgusting and fascinating to me, and I knew at once that it was the thin, pale woman with oily black hair curtaining her face. I’d seen her through the peephole. I remembered, looking at the bookcase, how she’d walked with a hunch, staring at the floor. I’d gotten a glimpse of her face, one afternoon; I’d stood on tiptoes at the peephole for long minutes near the time I knew her session was to end, gaze glued to the hallway, determined not to miss the moment she passed by. She looked splotchy, like she’d been crying. I’d pictured my father putting his hand on Z’s cheek, wiping the soft pad underneath her eye with his thumb, her tilting her cheek into his palm, closing her eyes.