Did they mean I’d embarrassed them? Or that I had hurt their feelings? Was it about their colleagues, their friends? Was it about Langham after all?

My father cleared his throat. “Something seems a little…off with you,” he said, and then echoed, “We’re concerned.”

“Where do I fit into your ‘we’?” I said.

As soon as the words leaped from my mouth, I was ashamed. I felt more desperate than I had the night before, in my stiletto heels, begging everyone to look at me, notice me, love me—it was humiliating, my need, my deep and repulsive need.

“You are in our ‘we,’” my mother said, but she was looking at my father, and I felt acutely separate from them.

“We want to help you,” he said.

“You came very late and left very early,” my mother said. “And”—she cleared her throat, she looked at the floor, here it was, it was coming—“you were very intoxicated.”

So that was all. They really and truly did not know. I felt a swell of despair. Finally she looked back up and met my eyes.

“I’m sorry to embarrass you,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re ashamed of me.”

“We aren’t ashamed of you!” she said, but her pitch was unnaturally high, and I knew that, at least a little bit, they were.

“We’re concerned about you,” my father repeated. That “we.” There were the two of them, and then there was me.

What was it, really, that had made them decide at this moment that I needed help? She’s unwell, I imagined them saying—was that what I had been trying to convey to them my whole life? It occurred to me, not for the first time, how strange it must seem that my parents had never sent me to see someone. But it wasn’t strange. To do so would have been to admit defeat; to have a child in therapy would have undermined everything they had tried to project. They did it themselves, with their rubber bands, their admonitions to “talk back” to my critical thoughts. I looked around the room: the fluffed pillows perched one in front of the other on the couch, like soldiers at attention; the satin coverlet, smooth and gleaming.

“But what made you think that now, of all times?” I said. This wasn’t the first time I’d come late or left early, and it certainly wasn’t the first time I’d been drunk. She had even offered me wine herself.

“Like I said, it was something about last night,” my mother said, then looked to my father, but he didn’t step in. “You seemed more…disconnected than usual.” She was stroking the back of her left hand with her right pointer finger, her go-to nervous tic. I remembered myself on this very couch, Langham nearby, my distress enveloping me.