Leo was super-upfront with his readers about his struggles as a SAHD. The loneliness! The loss of identity! The insecurity! The way he felt after school drop-off when the moms clustered together and never thought to invite him in on their conversations! Sure, they waved and said hello, but he never really, truly felt a part of things. He was an interloper, an intruder, an outsider.

In the kitchen, though, he felt as at home as a duck in water.

The blog started to take off. The page views grew and grew: fifty thousand a month, then a hundred thousand, then two hundred thousand. Advertisers started approaching. A few brands popped up to gauge interest about sponsored posts. Then it was more than a few; it got so that Lu could pick and choose among them, agreeing to a sponsored post only when she thought it was something Leo’s readers would genuinely believe in.

After a time, Dinner by Dad’s family felt as familiar to Lu (sometimes more) than her own. She learned how to use Lightroom software for editing food photos. Most bloggers photographed themselves, their kitchens, their children, but Lu decided to do something different: simple charcoal drawings of Leo’s children, his wife Jacqui, occasionally himself. (There was a time, in high school, when Lu had considered art school over a traditional college; she’d been doing charcoal drawings for almost as long as she could hold a pencil.) She was active on social media: Instagram, Twitter. And now—well, Lu wasn’t making quite as much as she’d made as an attorney, not yet. But she could see her way clear to a time when she’d surpass that. It happened. Look at apinchofyum.com; look at smittenkitchen.com.

Lu opened a bank account in her own name at a different branch in town and squirreled away her earnings. She hadn’t yet spent a penny of her blog money. She was just letting it grow and grow, and when she had enough, when she was ready to step out of the blogging closet, she was going to write a big fat check to Jeremy’s parents for every dollar they owed them. And then, at last, she’d be free.

“What’s this?” the Trusdales would cry. “However did you—?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Lu would say, smiling gently, eyes modestly downcast. “I’ve been doing a little freelance work on the side, that’s all.”

You’re so lucky, Lu’s mom always said. To be able to stay home with your kids. Lu’s mom had worked for forty years as the office manager for a dentist; Lu and her sister had been latchkey kids, eating Doritos straight out of the bag after school and inhaling unlimited quantities of Santa Barbara and Days of Our Lives. There had been no vegan chili: there had been no chili at all, not unless they cared to open a can of Hormel and dump it into a bowl themselves. In fact, that’s why Lu had become a good cook in her mid- to late teens. Necessity really was the mother of invention.