When I got home, I scurried through the backyard like a thief, unlocking my door in haste. It would only be a matter of time before Anna came knocking on my door, trying to con me out of who knows what.

I settled on the sofa with a book, pausing to peek out the window now and then to see if William was still there. For a while he remained, making notes on the back of an envelope. The afternoon stretched on. When I found myself sliding down on the sofa, I pulled a quilt over me for warmth. For unpaid time off, due to lack of work, this was close to perfect. All the comforts of home and it wasn’t costing me a cent. Next thing I knew, I’d drifted off to sleep.

Of course I didn’t hear from Dietz. I couldn’t believe he was so clueless when it came to his son. I’ve never even had a kid and I still had a better sense of what was going on. It was natural for Nick to be territorial. Not that there was any reason to be alarmed. Dietz and I were not an item. In the ebb and flow of our relationship, the tide was usually going out. I’d thought of Dietz as a gadabout, a freewheeling soul whose ties were few and whose life was his own. But nobody with kids can evade the commitment indefinitely. Dietz had lived as though he had no one to answer to. Naomi had stepped into the breach for him and filled the parenting role. Now that she was gone, he was “it.” Apparently, he hadn’t twigged to the fact that Nick and Graham would be looking to him for guidance, companionship, and spare cash. For the first time in all the years I’d known him—five by my count—I saw Dietz as a man with baggage. In the singles world, “baggage” is a dirty word, denoting ex-wives, double mortgages, spousal support, writs, liens, offspring of all ages, split-vacation time, alternating holidays, family-counseling sessions, attorneys’ fees, PTA conferences, private schools, college tuition, accusations, court appearances, and vicious spats on every conceivable subject, including any new relationship the offending parent was engaged in that the other parent objected to.

In my brief fling with Jonah Robb I’d had a taste of this. I was relegated to the wings, a peripheral character in the play that he and his wife/ex-wife had produced, cast, and starred in from seventh grade until the present. I’d bowed out in short order, smart enough to realize I’d never count for anything where he and Camilla were concerned. Let’s not even talk about his two girls, whose names I still had trouble remembering. Courtney might have been one. This new development with Dietz didn’t bode well for anyone. Nick had figured that out the first time he laid eyes on me.