I go down on the carpet and do some yoga poses. I haven’t stretched my body like this since my old life. I haven’t taken any kind of exercise class since I began looking after the kids, and my back cracks as I descend into cow.

I need to call Beth, explain to her calmly and rationally that we were wrong. She’ll be so angry with me, but I can handle that, I think. She’ll come around. She has to. And there’ll be enough room for everyone. There has to be.

I breathe out as I go into downward-facing dog, spotting the kitchen, the hanging pots and pans suddenly inverted. I go over the conversation with Anneliese in my head, channeling the anger I felt and trying to expel it out of my system as I breathe in and out. That hot ball of fury was so large, and I want it to deliquesce into mellow light.

As I sometimes do, I hear my father’s voice, the way he used to speak to me as I was falling asleep as a seven-year-old, reading from books like Bunnicula, Alice in Wonderland, A Series of Unfortunate Events, his tone softening as I became sleepier. Even when I was thirteen and refused to be tucked in, preferring to go into my room and put on headphones before bed, doing my homework to Arctic Monkeys or Animal Collective, I’d sometimes let him come sit beside me with a book as I was getting sleepier, his voice rising and falling with the dramas of the stories unfolding.

He didn’t really have the kind of wisdom to offer that fathers on TV or in movies tend to dole out. But as much as I hated it at the time, he was always quietly there. Ready to listen, to tell me with his steady gaze whether I was in the right during a high school fight with my friends, or when Gavin and I argued and I didn’t hear from him for a night.

I miss that calmness, that stable, mindful masculinity. And as I breathe out again, I see his face the way it looked the last time I saw him, in the den of the apartment, balancing a container of pad thai on his knees because the table was out for repairs, his glasses askew, thinning hair combed back. Instead of making me wince, it’s a reassuring, hopeful vision.

I fold my body into child’s pose, my muscles stretching and relaxing. I have an itch that I’m missing something, like the feeling of being watched, turning around and seeing nothing but your own shadow.

It’s just my own paranoia, isn’t it? That hot fury still trying to burn up any traces of forgiveness, of hope. I close my eyes, force myself to exhale it all out, visualize myself pushing that flaming ball out through my chest, my ears, my mouth.