Pigeon wound around her feet and Jess was just adding pasta to the boiling water when the door burst open and Juno rushed inside.

“Mom! How to Build the World’s Best Roller Coaster in Ten Easy Steps! I got it!” She kicked off her shoes and opened her bag in the middle of the living room, spilling the contents across Jess’s freshly vacuumed floor.

Setting the wooden spoon on the trivet, Jess turned away from the stove and leaned against the island. Did she look guilty?

“I was number two on the waitlist, but somebody didn’t pick it up, and so when I was there, Emily said I could check it out.” Juno slapped the book on the counter and finally came up for air. “I gotta start my project.”

“Hello to you, too.” Jess stopped the whirling dervish with an arm around her shoulders and reeled her daughter in to press a kiss to the top of her head. “Where’s Pops?” She looked out into the courtyard but didn’t see him.

Juno disappeared into the living room, returning with a blue folder, at least a dozen pieces of paper trying to escape it. “He’s taking Nana for Ethiopian food.” She toppled a neat stack of mail as she spread the papers out on the counter in front of her. Jess picked them up again. “The instructions say to use a nine-by-twelve piece of cardboard but I can also use a thirty-six-by-forty-eight.” She paused. “Do we have that?”

“You’re asking if I have a four-foot piece of cardboard lying around? Sorry. Fresh out.” Jess stirred the pasta and turned off the stove. “Baby, let’s try and keep it manageable? Where would we even put something that big?”

Juno looked around the apartment and motioned to the dining room table.

“And where would we eat?”

“At Nana and Pops’s.”

Jess looked at her daughter over her shoulder as she drained the noodles. “What else do you need to start this project?”

“Art tape, the big kind. Lots of it. Did you know that in Philadelphia somebody made a one-hundred-twenty-eight-foot cocoon out of translucent tape? Twenty-one miles of it! You can climb in it and everything.”

“Wow.” Jess pulled down plates and brought them to the counter.

“I also need glue and regular tape and construction paper to make the people.” She pointed to Jess’s iPad on the table. “Can I look it up?”

“May I,” Jess said reflexively, and dished noodles onto the plate, topping them with sauce.

Juno picked up Pigeon from the chair, lifted the iPad to wake it up.

“How was school today?” Jess asked, turning just as an image loaded on the screen.

A picture of her and River.

The cover of the Union-Tribune she’d been looking at this morning. Fuuuu—

“Mom!” Juno yelled. “That’s you and River Nicolas!”

Was it possible to lose all the blood in one’s body without actually bleeding?

“Is he your boyfriend?”

How was Jess supposed to answer that? That she was only pretending with River because they were paying her? That they were friends who just happened to be photographed wrapped up in each other’s clothes? How was it that she tried so hard to protect Juno, but consistently screwed everything up?