How could I prepare myself to come back and not feel anything for the people I was helping? I felt like I was trying to crack some code of how to become desensitized—feel less. Bethanny would always say it was important to feel the full spectrum of feelings, but I didn’t think so.

I also mostly avoided calls from my parents, because they were deeply invested in the moving-on portion of the divorce and needed frequent progress reports. I wanted to ask them for money but couldn’t bring myself to do it. If they thought I was struggling they would start to worry, and they had enough to worry about.

Anything I would say about my current state of mind would upset them.

The times I had answered, my mother would break into our conversations with “Are you happy?”

To which I would answer, “Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Mom, stop.”

“I want you to meet someone nice.”

Everyone wanted me to meet someone nice. Everyone wanted me to meet someone. In the middle of July, just as the city had started to heat up, a friend who didn’t know Bobby invited me to a dinner party. I scanned the invite list and noticed it was all couples. I was starting my life as a single person floating through couple parties. I decided to go see what it would feel like. What no one tells you is that a single woman at a dinner party is, more often than not, seen as a threat.

The house reminded me of what I did not have—might never have—in the form of a California Craftsman in Echo Park with a cute front lawn punctuated with bougainvillea and walls of jasmine. Inside, the house had a few kids’ toys strewn about tasteful, lived-in furniture. The couples were already milling around and talking to each other like they had known one another for years, and lived close enough so their children could go to school together. They were my age, but appeared to have done all the right things. I placed the bottle I was holding among the other bottles that had amassed on the table and went into the backyard, which, though similar to other backyards in similar houses crawling up and down the Eastside hills of Los Angeles, was also a touch more serene. There was an effortlessness about the lights strung around the frame of a pagoda where other couples, in the cute outfits that creative couples in L.A. wear (sack dresses, Hasbeens clogs), were talking in pairs. I took a breath and walked into the mix and poured myself a glass of wine.