The day Lu had told the partners in her firm that she wasn’t coming back after maternity leave, there had been a terrible rainstorm. She’d found a day when Jeremy, then a resident working who-knows-how-many hours a week, was off, so he could drive Lu in and stay in the car with the boys. Sebastian nursed too often to be without her for long, and it had felt very important to Lu that she do this errand in person. (Though in hindsight a phone call would have been perfectly fine.) Chase was just beginning to be toilet-trained, and some error of judgment or timing had resulted in his leaving the house in his big boy underpants—a privilege he hadn’t yet earned.

The partners were dismayed by Lu’s decision (she had been very good at her job) and they tried to woo her with talk of flex-hours and work-at-home Fridays. Lu was stalwart, firm. She knew those promises always lapsed and that at her firm there really was no such thing as flextime. The only real choice was all the time.

Leaving the office, she’d come upon a third-year law school recruit who was being given a tour of the building. She was probably only five years younger than Lu but at the time Lu—dark crescents underneath her eyes, nine pounds of baby weight lodged somewhere between her pelvis and her rib cage, breasts ballooned to three times their normal size, her whole body as unfamiliar as a foreign language on her tongue—felt like a dowdy spinster chaperone standing next to the season’s most desirable debutante. The envy she felt of this girl was palpable, breathtaking.

“Well, that’s done,” said Lu when she got back to the car. She tried to keep her voice brisk and nonchalant.

“How do you feel?” asked Jeremy. He looked even more tired and worn down than Lu felt.

“Great,” she said untruthfully. She gazed at Sebastian, sleeping in the car seat. “So relieved. It went really well.” She sniffed. “Did something . . . ?”

“Less well in here,” said Jeremy at the same time.

“I made a giant poop,” said Chase. A proud grin snaked dangerously across his face. “Right in my big boys!”

As if given a cue, Sebastian stirred in the car seat. He opened his eyes and began to suck frantically on his fist. A tiny spasm wracked his small body, and then he broke into a wail. Lu’s breasts simultaneously filled and began to leak. A great crack of thunder shattered the un-silence, and then the skies opened up.

Now, on the beach, Lu thought about that day and looked up at the sky. The wind was picking up. There must be a storm coming after all. Of course there was. They wouldn’t have stopped the ferries for nothing.

Lu had never walked out on Jeremy like that before. It was out of character. She wasn’t a passive fighter—she always saw a fight through to the bitter end, like a GLOW character with a mouth guard and a story to tell. Just ask her mother, her sister, or any of her ex-boyfriends. Jeremy had always been more cerebral, more measured in his approach to conflict, more willing to take a step back and think before speaking.