“I want to stay with you,” Sebastian said.

Lu hesitated and looked around the kitchen. “Sure, yeah, okay,” she said finally. “You can help me measure.”

“No problem,” called Maggie. Lu could hear her making a game with Chase out of picking up the pieces and the cards and putting them back in the box, which was not something Lu would have thought to do. She would have left the pieces scattered upstairs and tripped over them later, crushing the cardboard box in the process.

“Sebastian, come play with us!” Maggie called. “You’ll love this game, I made it up!”

This seemed to pique Sebastian’s interest: he dropped the empty measuring cup he’d been holding and was gone without so much as a backward glance.

Was everyone better at mothering her own boys than Lu was?

Lu was in between years in law school when she met Jeremy, on Main Street in Hyannis, near the Puritan Clothing Shop. She’d been thrown from her bike because a man in a parked car had opened his door just as she flew past. She wasn’t hurt badly, but the shock of it had been something terrible, and she’d lain immobile on the street for a moment, trying to work out if she was going to cry or not.

The man from the car was kneeling beside her, but Jeremy, who’d been parking his car when the accident happened, pushed him aside, almost roughly. “I’m a doctor,” he’d said. (That was a lie, it turned out; he was a second-year medical student.)

“Don’t you worry,” Jeremy had said, once the driver had left them. “I’m in medical school. I can fix anything.”

“Well, I’m in law school,” she’d answered. “So don’t mess up. I can sue anyone.”

He had laughed at that. And while he was laughing he looked at her knee where the skin had shredded off, and then he swabbed at it with a square of sterile cotton that he seemed to have pulled out of thin air, and by the time he was finished she was perfectly bandaged and there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere. He’d wheeled her bike carefully from the street to the sidewalk and then he said, “You’re lucky you didn’t bang your noggin. You should have been wearing a helmet.”

“I know,” she said, touching her miraculously unharmed head, charmed by his use of the word noggin. “I know I should have been.”

What if Lu hadn’t fallen off of her bike that day—what if she hadn’t even gotten on her bike, or had a bike to begin with? Lu rewound the tape in her mind all the way back to when she was a girl of five, the training wheels just off her pink Barbie-themed bike. One thing happened, then another—a seemingly random series of events—and then there was your future, sealed to this other person’s for such a long time, maybe even forever.

Poor thing, she chided herself, your marriage isn’t what you expected it to be. She remembered a middle school joke where you would rub your thumb and forefinger together. What’s this? you’d say. It’s the world’s smallest violin, and it’s playing just for you! If her mother, her sister, any of the destitute people living in inner cities and third world countries could hear her, that’s what they’d do. They’d play the tiny violin. And she deserved it. Marital dissatisfaction is a problem of wealth and privilege, she reminded herself. You are lucky to have this problem, because you are lucky to have the leisure to worry about such things as you sit in the summer home that you did not arrange or pay for.