Wish i could be there with you!

Lu watched a family of five, two parents and three daughters—maybe college age down to ten or eleven—crowd around a table made for four. The youngest daughter said, “Cecily, you’re not giving me any room,” and the father, maybe catching Lu looking, smiled ruefully and said, “The magic of family vacations!”

She smiled back and returned to her phone.

Me too, she typed to Jeremy.

In theory, yes. In theory more time together would be wonderful. In practice, well. If Jeremy were there right now he’d be another person to make lunch for and clean up after, another person to hide her laptop and her secret life from. He might want to talk about Baby Number Three; he’d probably want to start working on Baby Number Three! She knew it bothered him that Sebastian was already four—he’d wanted the children parceled out every two years.

She should have added an exclamation point.

Me too! she revised. He’d be happy to get it twice. She added a smiley emoji.

Fourteen more years of picking up dropped towels and unloading the dishwasher and loading it right back up again so the next day she could unload it yet another time: a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. Her mother would be horrified if she knew that Lu was thinking this way—what she wouldn’t have done to have no responsibilities other than the home and the kids. Lu could never reveal her dark thoughts to her mother.

“Is that a lake?” Sebastian asked, pointing at the computer screen with his toy tow truck. The thumb of his other hand was hooked into his mouth. They’d let him get too familiar with the pacifier, which he’d then traded for the thumb, and they hadn’t been able to break him of the habit. She was supposed to be working on that.

“It is,” Lu said. “Isn’t it pretty?”

Sebastian nodded, his little face grave. “I want to go to there.”

“Yes,” said Lu. She pulled him toward her and stuck her nose deep into his hair. “Yes, baby, I want to go to there too.”

She heard the tinkling of the bells on the door and then a voice said, “Hey, girl!” but Lu was facing away from the door and she didn’t turn to look; she didn’t know enough people here to get hey-girled in public. (Or private, really.) But then a shadow fell across her computer screen and suddenly Jessica, the daughter of Nancy’s friend, was sitting down across from her, and Lu was caught remembering that she hadn’t texted her back about going out for drinks. “Fancy meeting you here!” Jessica said. She was head-to-toe lululemon, sweating tastefully, and as Lu watched, she reached (with some nerve, Lu thought) out her arm and helped herself to one of the whoopie pies Lu had bought. “Ohmygod, these things are so good,” said Jessica. Her eyes rolled back in her head in an exaggerated display of pleasure and she picked up her phone.