Although I wouldn’t have thought it possible a minute ago, I now feel even guiltier. I should know the book my son always reads before sleep. The last time I read to him, which I swear couldn’t have been more than a month or so ago, his favorite was something different. A book about trains, I think.

“Where is it?”

Jacob reaches over to his night table. He grasps the book with both hands and passes it to me as if it’ll break if it hits the floor.

“Get all snuggly,” I say.

He wiggles under his covers and then pulls them up to his shoulders. “Ready.”

“Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel,” I say, then open the cover and begin to read.

After the story is finished, with Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Mary Anne, firmly ensconced in the basement of the new town hall, I ask Jacob if he’d like to read something else.

“No . . . I’m really sleepy,” he says.

“Okay,” I say, masking my disappointment that my time with Jacob is coming to an end. “Sweet dreams.”

My son closes his eyes and turns away from me.

Stuart is waiting for me on the living room sofa when I return from Jacob’s bedroom. He puts down his Kindle and offers to make me dinner.

“That’s okay. I’ll fix something for myself.”

“Don’t be silly. You just got home, and I’ve had three hours to unwind already. Besides, all I’m going to do is put the chicken fingers I made for Jacob in the microwave. Relax. I’ll pour us both a glass of wine.”

A moment later, Stuart places a plate of chicken fingers and roasted potatoes on the place mat in front of me and hands me a glass of white wine. As I begin to eat, Stuart talks about his work. It’s a subject that has never interested me. It’s all petty faculty disputes over the most trivial things, parents who think their kid is the next Picasso and don’t understand why Stuart doesn’t recognize true genius when he’s in its presence, and pressuring even seven-year-olds to get into the “right” college.

Tonight he’s going on about the school’s new principal, a woman named Natalie Owens. The changes Natalie seeks to implement at P.S. 216 have become a recurring theme of Stuart’s repertoire. It has something to do with sculpture, I know, but I was only half listening when Stuart mentioned it the first time, which means that I’m now uncertain whether the principal wants to introduce more or eliminate it. It’s too late for me to ask Stuart for that clarification, so I simply nod as he speaks.