A tall, bald man stood in the doorway. He wore maroon medical scrubs and had a smile so kind that Lauren felt her body unclench. That her massage therapist was a man surprised her—she’d pegged Gracie as an I-only-like-women-to-massage-me kind of gal. She looked at the man’s hands again. They were big and looked strong.

“Clancy,” he said. He gestured for her to follow. At the end of the hallway, he opened the door to a treatment room and ushered her in. “Undress, and then lie facedown under the sheet.” He bowed and exited.

Lauren untied the robe, staring down at her nakedness in the dimly lit mirror. Besides the fact that her belly button had changed shape, her body had bounced back after childbirth—not that she’d been spectacular beforehand, but she hadn’t gotten any worse. Still, those other mothers from the breakfast popped into her head. How slender most of them were. How they looked like they all did sixty minutes of cardio every day. She wouldn’t be getting a note for her appearance, would she? That would be some real internalized-misogyny bullshit.

So why would someone stick that note in her child’s backpack, then?

“Lauren?” There was a knock on the door as she was settling under the sheet. “You ready?”

“Yep!” Lauren tried to sound chipper. “Thank you!”

The door opened. She could hear Clancy bustling around, turning on the tap. Then came the slurping sound of the man rubbing oil between his hands. Lauren wriggled on the mattress, trying to get comfortable.

Clancy took a breath, then pressed his hands to her shoulders. Lauren shut her eyes, waiting for that gooey, unraveling feeling to spread through her body—she always wanted that to happen when she got a massage, but it never did. Clancy’s touch felt good, but she could feel her body resist whenever his fingers dug in.

“You’re very muscular,” he said after a minute of rubbing.

“Oh.” Lauren felt a thrill. “I can’t really credit that to working out.”

“. . . But you’re also really, really tense.”

The sides of the face cradle pressed against Lauren’s cheeks. She opened her eyes but could only see the tiled floor. “Yeah, well. It’s been a tough year.”

“Don’t I know it.” He sighed. “Do you know I never even got a stimulus check? Somehow the government skipped me.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lauren murmured. She and Graham had received a stimulus check, accidentally. They earned too much money to technically qualify. For weeks she’d tried to figure out how to give it back but then eventually gave up.

Then she said, “It’s also because I . . . had a baby. Seven months ago. It’s been stressful.”

“Ah.”

“The birth was sort of intense. My husband didn’t make it there in time.”

“Ooh. Rough.”