“Since when has that mattered?” Edie asked, and immediately regretted it. She didn’t want to start a fight. Since getting pregnant, Edie had been thinking a lot about her upbringing. She found a therapist in New Paltz and drove there every week to work out how she wanted to raise her own child differently. The therapist called Michelle and Gabe’s parenting style “benign neglect,” and suggested that the roots that should connect the four of them were shallow, the connections untended, which made facing challenges together difficult. What Edie had wanted to say to her mother in that moment was something like, We needed you more—we still need you. Was it the shallow roots that turned what felt like a plea on the inside into meanness when it hit the air? “I just never got the sense that our needs figured much into your plans.”

“I’m sorry, Eden,” said Michelle. “Are you complaining about the freedoms we allowed you? You certainly seemed to enjoy them at the time. And look at you. A Seven Sisters graduate, Claudia at NYU. I didn’t go to college, and your dad never graduated. You girls had everything. Have everything. But somehow we didn’t meet your needs as parents?”

“I don’t think that’s what she means, Mom,” said Claudia, trying to manage the situation. Claudia, who didn’t get her feelings hurt. But Michelle interrupted.

“I am forty-seven years old. My parents were both dead at fifty. I chose your dad because I loved him and I wanted to live my life with him. And we lived a great life together. We raised you—whether you like how we did it or not. But things change. People change. Your father has his music. That’s enough for him. He doesn’t need me anymore, either.”

The sisters looked at their dad, standing half a room away, gripping the back of one of the tall chairs at the kitchen island.

“Dad?” asked Claudia.

Gabe looked at Michelle and then his daughters. There was no fight in him. Edie touched her belly and said silently to the still-secret, plum-sized baby inside: I will never run out of fight for you.

“Your mom’s made up her mind,” said Gabe.

Michelle stood up abruptly: “Fine, make me the bad guy.”

Did she really not understand that she was blowing up their world? They were a family, and now she wanted out.

Upstairs, Edie and Claudia cried together, and Edie told her sister about the pregnancy. But Claudia didn’t react the way Edie had hoped. She started ranting about their mom, and how she couldn’t even manage to teach her daughters how to use birth control, and that she couldn’t believe she’d ever looked up to her, ever thought her superficial life was something to aspire to. We should know better, Claudia kept saying. We should know better.