I checked my messages. Mom had texted to ask if I’d seen Peyton’s cell phone. The simple query made my heart twist. It was so precisely Peyton, a quiz-bowl MVP who never forgot a fact but could not remember where she’d put her phone, or her shoes, or even the Burt’s Bees lip balm she claimed she’d die without. Anna-Claire had texted, too, telling me to check her Insta if I wanted to see the cookies. I had an immediate, fierce longing to feel my girls tucked up against me, one on either side, smelling of sugar and vanilla and coconut shampoo. But for now I needed them safe at Mom’s.

Trey had texted, too. He’d talked to both girls. Stomach flu! No wonder I haven’t heard from you. Rest up and feel better. Call me in the morning. Love you.

In the front seat, our young driver whispered into a headset, the nothing-talk of the newly in love. Something about a movie, but I could tell by the tone that the subject didn’t matter. They only wanted to be talking to each other.

Trey and I had been like that, once upon a time. Every happy couple has that phase. For us it happened fast. He was so easy to talk to that the glass of wine led to a dinner date, then a play with drinks after. We made the world bigger for each other. He liked to feed me things I’d never tried before: marrow, quail, unpasteurized French cheeses. His theatre experience was limited to sleeping through Phantom until I introduced him to Pearl Cleage, Sam Shepard, Tom Stoppard. I was playing Babe in Crimes of the Heart at school, and he came to see me. Twice.

Once we started sleeping together, I was lost. I’d had a couple of serious boyfriends, but neither of them had ever seemed to know if sex was good for me or not. Trey? Trey tried things and asked things, until he knew. Sex felt like something he was inventing for me. I abandoned my dorm room, commuting from his bachelor apartment up in Buckhead, addicted.

In the wake of it, my body languorous and so sated I felt as stretchy and abandoned as a cat, we would whisper back and forth. I got a pretty clear picture of the life he wanted.

Kids topped the list. At least two, and soon. He was thirty-three, and he wanted to have them young enough to camp and ski and scuba-dive with them. He imagined a big Buckhead house with an outdoor kitchen. Family dinners, game nights, summers at a second home on Tybee. He worried that he wouldn’t get these things with me.

“You’re so young,” he said over and over. At the museum, with my updo and understated makeup, he’d thought I must be twenty-five at least. “So young and so damn talented.”