She felt tricked, but the truth was she’d been tricked for years. After Sebastian was born she’d fallen under the spell of his steady infant gaze and the feel of his tiny hand grasping her thumb. Stay with me, his gaze had said. Don’t let us ever be parted. She’d acquiesced, and in acquiescing she’d joined the long line of women who had laid down their work and picked up their children.

She wondered if Chase might one day tell his therapist that when he was young his mother had one eye on him and his brother and the other on the screen of her laptop.

In the end, anyway, she’d fallen asleep on her side of the twin bed and had woken with a crick in her neck, Jeremy gone.

“Hey!” said Sebastian now, pointing to the airport parking lot. “It’s the cookie truck! Can we stop?”

Lu glanced over. Yes, the telltale French flag, the even more telltale line of people.

“Not now, sweetie, okay?” She had posted only once in the past three days; she knew if she didn’t get something up soon her readers would start to wander. It was the relentless pace of the really good blogs that made them successful: the relentless pace, and the fact that they made it look easy. (Sort of like motherhood.) “I really need to get home,” she told the backseat.

Chase was fully awake now. “I see Maggie!”

“No,” said Lu. “You can’t see Maggie, Maggie is helping her mom at Joy Bombs.”

“But I do. She’s right there.”

“She is,” confirmed Sebastian. “I see her too.”

Lu slowed to a crawl and squinted. There was a knot of teenagers off to the side of the food truck, and, yes, there was Maggie. There was the French boy who worked in the food truck; there was Maggie’s friend Riley. There were clouds of smoke rising around them, and a flash of black as Maggie handed something to Riley.

“Oh, Maggie,” Lu said. “Maggie, no.”

“What are they doing?” asked Sebastian.

“Nothing,” said Lu sharply.

Chapter 35

JOY

JOY WAS IN a wretched mood, tired and out of sorts, when Lu, Maggie’s employer, came into the shop. She replayed her fight with Anthony again and again. In romantic comedies, the false start always led to the Big Epiphany, the Grand Declaration. But they’d stopped at the false start.

Because life was not actually a romantic comedy, she reminded herself. Their false start had been a real end.

They sat. Joy listened to everything Lu told her, and then she shook her head and said, “I’m sorry . . .” Her head was all cobwebby; maybe she’d misunderstood. “I’m sorry . . . are you telling me you think Maggie was vaping?”

“I don’t know if she specifically was vaping,” said Lu. “I just know that the kids around her were.”

Joy was not going to admit that she wouldn’t recognize vaping if vaping walked up and tapped her on the top of the head. She’d do Google Images when she got back to her office. “Who was she with?” She felt a panicky feeling rise. “Maggie doesn’t know any kids who do vaping.”