(She almost said it. Out loud.)

“Why you what?” He seemed genuinely curious, which Lu appreciated.

“Why I liked law school so much,” she recovered. “There was lots of writing. Everybody else got tired of it, but I never did.” That was true. “In college, I was an English major. I was crazy for Virginia Woolf. Money and a room of one’s own, and all of that.”

He nodded approvingly. “Good choice,” he said. “From one English major to another.”

“My senior year my housemates and I adopted a cat and I named her Lily Briscoe.”

“I love it. Lily Briscoe the cat.” He laughed sincerely.

His laughter felt like an achievement to Lu. She didn’t feel like she’d made Jeremy laugh at all lately, either because he hadn’t been here or when he was she was too busy covering her tracks to indulge in humor. And they used to laugh so much! All the time, laughing until they got stitches, laughing until the cows came home. Even during sex, they used to laugh.

Chase’s and Sebastian’s plates rattled as they went into the sink—Lu knew she was walking that fine line between teaching them table-clearing manners and risking broken dishes she’d have to replace. They were very excited because Maggie had seen a notice for an event at the Island Free Library. The library was having an exotic-animals person in, which was exactly up Chase’s alley. Lu imagined the exotic-animals person might bring a lizard or an iguana; perhaps, if they were lucky, a chinchilla or a nonthreatening but impressively long snake the children could take turns wearing on their necks. She knew, of course, that Chase, having glimpsed the poster downtown, was hoping for a wallaroo or a Siberian tiger.

Once the boys had disappeared into the living room and turned on the television, Lu asked, “So, really, what was it like? Being the son of someone like that?” Jeremy would have disapproved of television time immediately after dinner. He wanted them to play wholesome board games, but he was never here to play them.

Anthony moved the last bit of broccoli around his plate. It was extra-charred, and if Lu had known him better she might have asked him if she could have it. “It was all I knew,” he said. He squinted at his plate. “I don’t really have a point of comparison, you know? I mean, I guess what I would mostly say is that our worlds revolved around him, my mother’s and mine. We traveled where he needed to go, we stayed quiet when he needed to work, we ate dinner at the same time every night because he worked best when everything around him was really controlled. He was like a god to me, you know? And then . . . I don’t know. I showed him my first story, and everything changed.”

“Probably he was jealous.” To Lu that seemed obvious. When she’d first read A Room Within she’d been blown away.