He says, “You as well,” and follows me to the parking lot. The clouds are gray, the asphalt littered with dark spots where raindrops have already fallen. Close at heel, Nick asks, “She your nurse?”

“Office manager.”

“She seems nice.”

“Sure,” I say, thinking, Really? Her, too?

The sky opens before we reach the car. We’re half-drenched when we buckle our seat belts. I say a prayer for my leather interior and pull onto the road, my windshield wipers squeaking like twin metronomes ordering me home, ordering me to drive faster, faster. A yellow light changes to red, igniting my rain-streaked windows with fits of fire as we pass through it. No thunder, no lightning, no drama—just rainwater evacuating our beaches, sending city snobs back to their overpriced timeshares, where they’ll mix mojitos and play board games and track muddy sand onto other people’s floors. To think, there was a time I wanted to grow up and be one of those barefoot visitors. The teenage Me would drive to East Hampton in the summer just to sit on benches or blankets to watch the city kids, to study the differences between Them and Us, observing urbanites as though they were alien specimens in a living lab—like in that Twilight Zone when a marooned astronaut winds up caged in a zoo on a distant planet, his natural habitat re-created by extraterrestrials ogling the creature kept behind four walls, a pretty yard, a picket fence. Joke’s on him. The punch line: people are alike everywhere.

Hard to believe I ever aspired to work like mad in Manhattan just so I could escape to a beach house on the weekend. Now I know better. I live better, having bypassed the need for escape by shooting straight to the good life. I’m my own boss, playing Trivial Pursuit in my own fancy house, making my own mark. Upgrading everything. I was naive and tenacious enough to start a private practice before the system went berserk. Young doctors today aren’t so lucky, but those are the breaks. The American Dream has always been a changeling.

I press my foot on the gas, rocketing toward a new mental picture: young people flocking to my world in pursuit of role models and model lives. They draft dreams around us, then they grow up to push us out. Don’t be Nick’s interactive education, I tell myself, and something flashes. For a moment, it seems like my brain is the thing flickering—lit up by a thought, sparks thrown from the thought—but the flashes are blue and white lights in my rearview mirror, activated half a second before the siren begins. “Goddamn it,” I say, tapping the brake, flipping my turn signal. I hang a right and find a discreet place to park behind the bank. “Jesus, I pulled over already. You think he could turn those lights off?”

Nick doesn’t answer. He just says, “Man.”