Once, while lazing around in bed, we got into a long, fairly academic discussion on the topic of booty calls.

“That’s not what it was!” I had exclaimed, whipping him with a pillow as he’d doubled over in laughter. “How dare you cheapen our relationship like that?”

“I’m not trying to cheapen it,” he had said, flinging the pillow across the room and then pulling me close, his nose nestled against the back of my neck. “How do you define a booty call?”

“I don’t, typically.”

“Okay, but if you had to, what would you say?” he had asked, and I could feel him smiling against my skin. “Is it the actual encounter itself, or is it the intent behind it? Because even though I knew we had something special from day one—”

“Yeah, yeah…”

“—I did call you late at night sometimes, and those calls often resulted in boo—”

“Ugh!” I had cried, yanking the other pillow from beneath his head and smacking him with it. “You’re disgusting,” I had said, but my giggles had made it clear that I didn’t find a single thing about my husband disgusting.

• • •

I think that was why I couldn’t get Lotti and the woman in the window out of my mind. I was jealous of their modern-day booty text. It was so incredibly silly, so pathetic, so disappointing, but that’s how I felt. I could see the stiff brushstrokes that would illustrate the tension in Lotti’s shoulders as he gazed up at the window, the whispery curves of the woman’s body as she pressed herself against the glass.

And I was jealous as hell.

I finished getting dressed and looked back at the bed. There was a part of me that wanted to crawl back in beside Keith and pull him on top of me so I could feel his weight crushing down on me. But I knew he wouldn’t wake up, or worse yet, he would and turn his back to me. So instead, I picked up my purse and left the bedroom.

I walked past Shelby, who was still sprawled on her stomach, unmoving. I grabbed my phone off the coffee table where I’d tossed it earlier. It was sitting on top of a pile of scratch-off lottery tickets I’d bought from a gas station on my way home. I scooped them up so I could throw them away later; if Keith found them in the trash, I’d hear about it for days.

“It’s a waste of money,” he’d said when he’d found one errant ticket a few weeks back. He had become better at moving around, the wheelchair sliding easily between his fingertips, and he’d rolled himself up to the coffee table. “Besides, you know how I feel about gambling.”