“Mommy, I need you!” called Chase from the downstairs bathroom. He was using that singsong voice that, try as Lu might, she could not keep from grating on her nerves; he sounded like a child on a bad television commercial, not like his true, authentic self. Sebastian was beginning to pick it up too.

“Just a minute,” she called combatively. She fixed her eyes on Maggie, who was staring at Lu as one would stare at a friendly apparition that had appeared unexpectedly.

“I hope you don’t mind,” began Maggie slowly, and, because she guessed what was coming, Lu, in her head, said, I peeked at your computer.

Lu stared hard at Maggie’s T-shirt, which showed a gravestone with a water droplet on it and the words RIP Water You Will Be Mist.

“I peeked at your computer,” continued Maggie. “Which I know I shouldn’t have done.”

Lu had a queer sensation in her stomach.

“And I can’t believe . . . you are . . . are you . . . are you Dinner by Dad?” Sebastian had wandered off; there was nobody to hear, but Maggie lowered her voice anyway.

“Maybe,” said Lu carefully, assessing. “Possibly.” Her first instinct was to chide Maggie for looking at something that wasn’t hers. For snooping. That was against the rules of general civility and the rules of being in someone else’s house as well.

But something stopped her, and later, when she had time to think about it, she figured out what it was. It was the ghosts of girls from time immemorial being told to follow the rules, stay quiet, not make a fuss, never do anything that might get them in trouble. Don’t speak up, don’t have an opinion, and if you have one please express it very quietly and in a way that won’t offend anyone around you. Be good girls, now, her mother used to tell Lu and her sister. Or: The way you’re sitting/standing/eating/thinking: that’s not very ladylike.

When Lu excelled at Stanford Law she heard her mother once confess to an aunt her concern that Lu might never find a man if they all thought Lu was smarter than they were. “Men don’t like that,” she’d whispered to the aunt. At the time, listening from the kitchen, Lu had felt herself swell with outrage and indignation. But as time went on she came to see her mother as the product of her own background and upbringing. Two daughters, no husband, the responsibilities of their little world all squarely on her shoulders. Her mother had worked her whole life at the same job, nine to five as a receptionist at a dental office, fifty weeks a year, while her heart grew unhealthy and her ankles got thick and her vision went blurry and time ticked away and her daughters watched soap operas after school. She didn’t know any better—who on earth would have taught her?

But there was Maggie, looking at her with her eyes bright and hopeful, and she was so interested in what Lu was going to say next, and she was so young and unsullied and her potential was vast and untapped, so there was nothing for Lu to do but to meet her gaze levelly and say, “Yes. You’re right. Yes.”