Lu sighed. Tomato and mozzarella had been done and done again by every food writer in the blogosphere. She’d have to do better. Cube it? Add farro, salami, grill the bread? Make the bread first, and then grill it?

Leo and his family lived near a beautiful clear lake in an unnamed state. Somewhere vague, midwestern. The lake had glorious sunsets and offered lots of water sports. Leo was teaching the boys to paddleboard. He was a trained lifeguard, of course, and they kept the paddleboards in shallow water, so there was no real danger. Leo was really careful like that. You could trust him with anything.

Some summer nights, when Jacqui wasn’t kept too late at work, Leo packed up one of his delectable dinners and the whole family walked down to eat at one of the picnic benches near the lake. What a blessing it was to live somewhere so civic-minded, where taxpayer dollars went to keeping the town so beautiful and user-friendly. You could even recycle your plastics right there at the lakefront.

Sometimes they stayed to see the sunset, if the boys weren’t too tired. Oh, those boys did get tired! Outside all day, helping in the vegetable garden and (yes!) swinging from the tire swing Leo had hung from a branch of the old oak tree in the yard. Gosh, that tree must have been there for generations.

And of course Jacqui rose so early to get to work, and had to look so very presentable. Sometimes it was difficult for Leo to keep up with the dry cleaning. He didn’t let it get him down, though.

Lu scrolled through Google Images, wondering if she could find a photograph of a lake that would look anonymous enough that she could claim it as her own, as Leo’s own.

“You got a text,” said Sebastian. He’d come around to stand beside her, holding her phone. Lu chewed her lip. She’d only gotten—what? Four minutes of work done? She took the phone from Sebastian and glanced at it. Jeremy: rough here hows it going there? (Definitely cube the mozzarella, she thought. And farro . . . that could work. That could really work. Remember how Leo’s son Charlie had loved farro the first time he’d tried it? Nobody had expected that! But children were full of endless surprises.)

Lu tried not to feel like knives were scratching at her vertebrae. She loved her family to the moon and back, of course she did. She just didn’t need to be around them all day, every day. For—how many more years? Chase was six, Sebastian four. Fourteen years until they’d both be away at college. She was a terrible person for thinking that.

She wondered what would happen if she texted back, Im losing my fucking mind. Jeremy didn’t want to hear that; when he was at work he wanted to think of Lu and the boys packaged up nicely, tied with a bow, the perfect family.

Great! she texted back. Just packing up for the beach.