So last night Holly had gone around the usual channels. She asked Erin for the old ad, the one the recruiters had drafted a few years ago during another one of Ted’s tantrums at some lapse in Dawn’s performance, and she’d updated it herself. The children were older now, and the family’s needs had evolved. The revised text reflected this. Holly was weirdly proud of her work. When the time came to schedule interviews, she could show Ted the brief and he would understand why finding someone new—someone professional yet approachable, decisive but in a family-friendly way—would be better than trying to make Zanne into something she wasn’t, could never be. Holly emailed the updated text to Erin and asked her to send it straight to the headhunters, without cc’ing Ted or waiting for the rounds of review and approval that he would surely demand.

“Let’s fast-track this,” Holly had said, determined not to spend the next ten years going through Zanne to get to her husband.

But she hadn’t imagined anything like this. The speed with which this person, this Christa Whitmore whoever she was, had not only found the ad and spread it but also taken the time to annotate it first was whiplash-inducing. Holly didn’t even know how to use the filters on her phone’s camera, the ones that let you add antlers to your head or whiskers to your cheeks or put a button-nose on your baby.

She flipped the phone over so the screen wouldn’t accidentally light up again.

When they got to the marina, Flynn ran on ahead while James and Holly unloaded the trunk together. These were the moments she missed Ted most. Will he be okay without us? she wanted to ask him. Will he brush his teeth? Did we pack enough underwear? Holly’s parents hadn’t been joined at the hip by any means, but certain things they always did together—wrapping Christmas presents behind their closed bedroom door, the weekend in late March when they wrestled through their taxes, sitting in the stands for home games, her dad watching the quarterback and her mom watching her cheer. Instead, now Holly had James and Ilya. Then again, Ted wouldn’t have thought to pack the handcart James lifted out of the back now and unfolded with one hand. He wouldn’t have been able to stack all of their son’s things into one well-balanced tower, leaving Holly to carry only the hostess gifts.