For some reason, she hadn’t been able to cry for him, though, hadn’t shed a single tear. Instead, she had hardened, closed off. Made herself numb. It was like an underwater bomb had detonated inside her, and on the surface, it had made only a slight ripple, but in her inner abyss, the blast had destroyed everything.

“Mommy! Hello!” A high-pitched voice called loudly through the neighborhood.

Heloise and Gerda both turned toward the street and looked over the edge of the balcony.

On the fourth floor of the building across the street, a tan little hand stuck out of a window that was ajar.

“Hi, honey,” Gerda yelled back.

“Hi, Lulu-mouse.” Heloise waved with both arms. “Are you going to bed?”

“Yes. What are you doing?”

“We’re eating sushi,” Heloise replied.

“When are you coming home, Mommy?”

“I won’t be long,” Gerda yelled.

“Okay. Good night!”

“Good night, sweetie.” Gerda blew a kiss to her six-year-old daughter.

“Is Christian home?” Heloise asked as the window across the street closed.

“No, he’s in Singapore.”

“Who’s watching Lulu, then?”

“My mom, God bless her.”

“Oh, sweet old Kamma,” Heloise said, and put her hand over her heart. “I don’t think I’ve seen her since—what— Christmas?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Maybe we could all get together for a Sunday thing sometime soon?”

Gerda nodded.

Heloise loved that she and Gerda still lived so close to each other.

When Gerda had married Christian, Heloise had worried that they would become like every other married couple and move out into the suburban trenches into a soulless bunker of a single-family home with a chest freezer in the basement and an attic room filled with boxed-up memories from their youth together, but no. They had invested in a condo diagonally across from Heloise’s. Lulu needs her auntie, they had said, and Heloise had wept with joy.

“By the way, did I tell you about my client who fell in love with me?” Gerda exclaimed.

“Aren’t they all in love with you?”

The sight of Gerda routinely reduced people into gawking apes. Heloise had seen it happen more times than she could count. It wasn’t just that Gerda was ridiculously good-looking—as in gorgeous in a drop-dead, otherworldly, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me kinda way. She was also somewhat like the riddle about the boy and his dad who’ve been in a car accident: The ambulance takes them to the hospital. The child is taken into one operating room and the father into another. Then the doctor comes into the boy’s room, looks down at him, and says, “I can’t operate on him—he’s my son!” And then people rack their brains and wonder How in the world can that be?, when the obvious answer is that the doctor is the boy’s mother.

Oh my God, a female surgeon? Shocking …