“I doubt they’d want to feature Matthew anyway. He’s just a baby.” Her cell phone pinged. Happy to! Clarissa wrote. “You know, this weird thing happened. I asked the director this totally innocent question, and she looked at me like I was from another planet.”

“What did you say? Did you . . . you didn’t get angry, did you?”

Lauren stiffened. “Excuse me?”

“No, I mean . . . you know.” Graham tried to sound jokey, nudge-nudge. “I’m just making sure! This school’s costing us enough money—we want to get off on the right foot!”

Just like that, Lauren could feel it coming on. The low simmer with rising bubbles. Silver Swans had been a point of contention with them. Back when Lauren thought she’d be flush from Huzzah!, they put down a deposit to send Matthew—Silver Swans was running an incentive that if they enrolled a child in the six-month-old class, they’d be charged a slightly lower rate going forward. When the game sale didn’t go through, Graham argued that they should retract the down payment, but Lauren didn’t want to. She wanted Matthew at this school, and who knew if there would be spots for him in the future? (Ironically, there probably would be spots for him, considering how many people had pulled their kids out, but Lauren hadn’t known that then. And then the deadline to cancel Matthew’s spot in the school passed, and she couldn’t get their money back, so now they were just . . . going for it.)

“I didn’t get angry,” she said. “I mistook some man for Piper’s teenage son, a simple mistake, and she got really strange about it.” Graham opened his mouth to speak, but she held up a finger. “But the conclusion you automatically jump to is that I’m a hot mess? That I’m going to be inappropriate in public? Do you realize how that makes me feel?”

“Honey.” Graham licked his lips. He was nervous, she could tell. He knew her signs by then. “It’s also . . .” But then he stopped, changing his mind. “Forget it. Let’s talk about this later. When we’re not in traffic.”

“What were you going to say?”

They were on the ocean road at that point; only a few feet away was a running path full of joggers and bikers. Graham had to slow down to obey the speed limit. He pushed his wedding ring around his finger. “It’s just that . . . am I really so out of line for being concerned? Excuse me if I get sort of jumpy about you potentially making a scene.”