“No!” I’d pulled Betsy over my raw skin, but now I felt her shell trembling, and my voice shook. Those soft, sleepy baby sounds could crack me. “I’ll text as soon as it’s done. I can hear . . . I can’t . . .” A small hysteria was rising in my voice. I was losing control of what my face was doing. I grabbed the bracelet, pressing it upward, feeling the good dig of it into my arm.

“All right, all right,” she said. Her voice was trembling, too. “Go on, then, but remember, my daughter will have eyes on you. You’d best do this thing.”

“I promise,” I said.

She hung up.

I stood by the curb, head down, clutching my purse, until I was Betsy again, bold and calm. Then I strolled toward the entrance to give the man with the clipboard my name. Saying it felt like a lie.

He checked the list, then smiled. “Have a good time, Mrs. Cabbat.”

I hurried through the Botanical Garden’s winding paths, passing beds and buildings and huge, living statues made of wire frames covered in plants. They had a medieval theme happening this season, with a twenty-foot-high dragon in a thousand shades of green, leaves overlapping like scales. He faced a flowery knight on a blooming white horse’s back.

I wound my way toward the sounds of a jazzy piano and a woman singing, torchy and low. Coming around a curve, I almost ran into a group of people. Three couples, the men in sleek suits, the women in cocktail dresses. I didn’t recognize any of them, so they were probably clients.

“Excuse me,” I said, passing them.

I was a little out of breath. I made myself slow down. I could not arrive sweaty and tumbled. God, this would be so much easier if Trey were with me. I wouldn’t have to work so hard to be a woman who belonged here. Trey pulled me into conversations, his hand resting lightly on my hip, putting me at ease with his coworkers and clients. With him I didn’t need Betsy’s carte blanche Visa.

He’d always done this for me. His gaze had made me confident from the first time it landed on me. I’d been in the middle of an uncomfortable acting-class assignment, quaking inside, when our paths first crossed.

The assignment sheet said, “Choose a wholly unfamiliar place in which you feel YOU don’t belong. Invent a self who does. Dress the part and go there. Interact. Feel it, live it, be it.”