She thought again of Virginia Woolf. Money dignifies. And she told him about the money, all of it: what she had in her secret account, and what she was making from affiliate links, and how many potential advertisers she’d found just this summer, and what her agent thought she could make in a book deal. She watched something change behind his eyes as she spoke—as fleeting as a flame, as undefinable. Was it hope? Desire? Disbelief?

Then she knew. It was respect. The money was changing it for him.

You go, Virginia, Lu thought. Nearly nine decades ago you wrote those words, and you hit the nail on the goddamn head.

“I didn’t realize,” he said.

“Of course you didn’t. I never told you. It’s another secret I was keeping from you. But with this kind of money, we can do a lot. We can pay your parents back. We can hire a nanny. We can get that awful wallpaper out of the basement bathroom.”

Jeremy smiled at that. “That wallpaper is horrendous.” She waited. The wallpaper was the least of it, obviously. “The money is a big deal, Lu. I get that. That’s huge. But even so, a nanny isn’t going to replace you giving them your full attention. Despite everything you’re saying, I still think one of us should. They’re still so little. That’s what we believe in. That’s what we always agreed on. Don’t you see?”

Again, the sensation of the high dive, the closing of the eyes, the jumping. “That’s not what I believe anymore. I’m sorry, Jeremy, no. I don’t agree.” She shrugged, and there was an apology in her shrug, but at the same time there was no apology at all. “I just don’t agree.”

“What do you mean?”

She stood and walked over to the window, which faced Anthony’s cottage. “If you think one of us needs to be home full-time with Chase and Sebastian, then you need to quit your job and be home with them.”

“Quit my job? I can’t quit my job. You can’t really mean that, Lu. People don’t quit jobs like mine.”

She whirled around. “Of course I don’t want you to stop being a doctor. Of course not. I’m trying to point out how ridiculous that would be, for me to ask you to do that. Priorities change, Jeremy, and needs change, and our priorities about this aren’t the same anymore. They just aren’t.” Jeremy’s mother had been home with him, and he’d loved it; Lu’s mother hadn’t, and she wished she could have been more. But she was finally able to articulate the exact thought that had been eluding her all summer: her need to be more than a mother now outweighed her belief that a parent needed to be the primary caretaker. “What you want me to need and what I need aren’t the same.”

There, she’d said it. Everything but the big one.

Jeremy got off the bed and came to stand beside her.