I was about to go to sleep when I realized that I hadn’t included Jasper. I experienced a stab of guilt: I hadn’t thought about my son, and now it wasn’t clear how to incorporate him. Where had Jasper been the whole time? I finally decided that he had been sleeping the entire evening. That was plausible. He was only five years old, after all. So I created a bed for him in Natalie’s room, and layered his delicate little body onto that bed. It was Natalie and Jasper, as opposed to Natalie and Piper, who were asleep in Natalie’s room. It was as if Piper had gone home after the movie, and Jasper and Natalie were asleep in their beds.

I texted Amelia again Saturday morning and didn’t hear back. I felt increasingly unmoored and didn’t know what to do with myself. I needed contact with the Straubs. I hadn’t seen them or spoken to them for a week.

Ian was now my only source of information. I made plans to meet him for dinner at a gastropub in the West Village. After dinner, we bundled up and walked down Greenwich Avenue through the crowd of pedestrians. After several blocks, we came to a red light and he checked his watch. “Do you want to have a drink with me?” His breath escaped from his mouth in a misty cloud.

This was what I’d been hoping for. I took his gloved hand in mine, looked him in the eye, and nodded. Behind him was a group of rowdy teenagers. One of the heavier girls was holding a lamppost and pretending to do a striptease, with one knee hooked around the pole.

“At my apartment, I meant to say.”

“I know,” I said.

The teenagers laughed at the pretend striptease. They chanted: “Donna! Donna!”

“I haven’t been on too many dates recently,” Ian said shyly. “I forget the protocol.”

I pressed my fingers into his palm.

We crossed the street and passed a group of loud tourists, maps in hand, young women with bare shoulders and cleavages exposed in spite of the mid-March frost. Even before I moved to New York, when I’d visited for a weekend, I despised the tourists, though I myself was one. I could see how different we were from real New Yorkers. Less sophisticated, less educated, less everything. Even then, I wanted people to believe that I lived here. I understood how important it was to fit in. Emily Miller had been helpful in that respect. She’d grown up with money and understood the landscape. When I was working on her weddings, I watched her. I listened to her. She’d pretend to let her hair down, but she was performing the entire time—not unlike Amelia Straub. A consummate professional, Emily never said or did anything by accident.