The drive from Southampton to Dr. Hart’s house takes half an hour. Eagerness turns to nervousness on the way. I haven’t visited this neighborhood since—shit, since Jonah Hart’s high school graduation a few years back, probably. There was a double rainbow that day. I wore my yellow sundress with blue flowers on the hem.

I wonder if he wonders why I wasn’t there tonight.

I wonder if he thinks I had a date, or if he even knows that I have friends. He’d probably be surprised to learn I used to date one of them, that I’ve had sex with other women and that I have sex with men, too. He probably doesn’t see me as a sexual creature at all, or as anything other than the lady who operates the beautiful French carousel that is his life. He needs me, sure. But he doesn’t need to know me. Why would he?

I wonder if he even noticed I didn’t show.

On his block, I kill my headlights and roll to a stop across the street from his house. The lights are on in almost every room, but there aren’t extra cars in his driveway or on the curb, and the only people floating back and forth in that bay window are Dr. Hart and his wife. He’s a different animal when he’s not wearing that white coat at work. I wish he were an uglier animal.

And her. She’s untouchable. Makes it look so easy. The weird thing, though, is that nothing about her is all that special. It’s not like she has the perfect face or the perfect body or even the perfect clothes. If it wasn’t her in that skin, people might not even pay attention. If she lived in, like, Kansas or Dubuque, or any place where it’s hard to get sushi and Botox—the kinds of places where no one knows how to cut hair and the only jeans you can try on before buying are regular blue jeans that do nothing remarkable for the butt—she might even pass for plain. But the way she carries herself makes it impossible to look away. And it’s not even, “Oh, how pretty.” It’s more like, “Whoa, what is that?”