“I got your voice mail,” I said. “When I couldn’t reach you, I decided to just come.”

“Ah,” my father said, pulling his phone out of his back pocket to see my missed call, then laying it on the side table. “We were at MoMA.”

“Good?” I said. I wanted to hug him, even the awkward, pat-on-the-back kind, just to be near him, but it would require conspicuously crossing the several yards between us, then initiating the embrace—Oh! he might say, how awful—and I stopped myself.

He nodded: they’d seen a photography exhibit. My mother was more interested in abstract art, but I knew when she wanted to see that she took herself.

“So, why did you call?” I asked, and suddenly I became nervous. I hadn’t thought this was why I’d come, but now I realized I was afraid to hear whatever it was they needed to say—a critique of my behavior last night, this month, this year? Or was it some dire piece of news? Had one of my grandmothers fallen ill? Were they giving up the practice, moving out of New York City; was there financial difficulty; were they splitting up?

“Come—let’s sit down,” my mother said. “Do you want anything to drink, eat?”

“I’m okay.” I folded myself into the corner of the couch, and my father lowered himself into his armchair. My mother sat in the chair next to him, the two of them facing me. My father shifted forward, elbows on knees, then changed his mind and leaned back again. I realized I was sweating, my shirt damp and cold beneath my armpits. I took one of the decorative pillows onto my lap, pressing it into my stomach. Did they notice? There’s no need to be nervous, I silently begged them to say. I pictured Freud putting his hands on my head, his fingertips on my eyebrows, and, for a brief moment, closed my eyes. Still, no one spoke; I wasn’t sure if they were waiting for me to begin, but wasn’t it my mother who had called me? The awkwardness was oppressive.

“Can you tell me what you called about?” I said. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Well, we aren’t making you nervous,” my father said. “Feelings aren’t made by external circumstance. They’re made by your own internal commands—” But I saw my mother cut him a look, and he stopped speaking short of where I knew he was going, that only I was responsible for how I felt. In a way, it was true. Yet it left me painfully, unbearably alone.

“We wanted to talk to you about last night,” my mother said, and I raced to discover what she could mean before she said it—coming late, being drunk, leaving so abruptly—or had they found out about Langham?—finally. “We’re concerned about you.”