Finally, his relentless networking paid off, and he had landed an interview with the private equity firm Texas Pacific Group. It was a prestigious job, one he would be far more pleased about taking than the subpar banks the headhunters had been lobbing his way, but after the first round of interviews it became clear that if Malcolm were hired it would be to work in the Dallas office.

“Would you move to Dallas?” he asked Darley, biting at his thumbnail, his nervous tell. She knew he had absolutely no desire to move to Texas, to uproot his kids and live that far away from his parents.

“We’ll live wherever you live, my love,” Darley promised. He needed a job, and she needed to support him. He flew out on a Thursday morning for two days of interviews and a weekend of golf with a business school friend at the firm, and Darley wished him luck, not sure what she even really meant, or how hard to cross her fingers.

That Sunday Darley began to run the kids at dawn: they went to soccer practice on the plaza, they marched to the bagel store for a second breakfast, they visited the carousel in Dumbo for two-dollar rides on the antique horses, and then demolished a giant plate of mac and cheese that Darley bought for sixteen dollars at the Time Out Market because it was made with Gruyère and lardons, two facts entirely lost on her small voracious charges. Her children behaved best when exercised within an inch of exhaustion, so instead of bringing them home after lunch, where they would inevitably beg to watch cartoons on their iPads, rendering them cranky zombies, Darley took them to her gym to continue the Iron Man–like marathon that was a weekend without child care.

Her gym was inside the Hotel St. George, what had once been the biggest, most glamorous hotel in all of New York City, hosting American presidents and famous celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Cary Grant. The hotel stretched an entire city block; in its heyday the massive saltwater pool had mirrored ceilings and waterfalls, the ballroom held weddings, and the hotel employed more than a thousand people. By the 1980s, it was sold to developers, sliced and diced, and the famous pool was drained. Part of the building was turned into student housing, the tower was transformed into luxury condos, the lobby became a bodega, a butcher, and a liquor store, and the vast section in the middle of the building—the place where the pool used to be—became Darley’s gym. Ghosts of the original remained, the green balconies that once overlooked the swimming pool were now home to a series of elliptical machines where old people and college students climbed to nowhere, earbuds screwed into their ears. Lavish carpeting covered a strange waiting area by the squash courts, and the path to get from the locker room to the tiny new swimming pool required a series of stairs and doors, twists and turns that made Darley feel like she was walking through the underbelly of Penn Station in a wet Speedo.

In the women’s locker room, Darley and the kids pulled on their suits, L.L.Bean one-pieces for the girls, trunks and a long-sleeve swim shirt for Hatcher, who was so skinny he turned blue and started chattering if he didn’t wear a layer in the pool. Poppy was so accustomed to seeing Hatcher in a shirt that the first time she saw a man in the pool bare-chested she started screaming, “Mommy, that man is NAKED,” and caused a minor scene with the attendant.

They shoved their sneakers and clothing into lockers, stepped into flip-flops, wrapped up in thin, white gym towels, and began the long trek to the pool, Darley bringing up the rear with a bag of goggles, noseclips, diving sharks, and bathing caps. They went through the women’s showers, past the steam rooms, through a back door, and down a set of stairs with flaking green tile, along a snaking chilly hall to the pool, where the air was twenty degrees warmer and thick with chlorine. The children threw their towels down and jumped in immediately, ignoring Darley as she asked them to wait for her. They were both excellent swimmers, and she often marveled that their spindly arms were actually strong enough to motor them around so quickly. They looked like little spandex eels, wriggling with pleasure in the bright blue water.

There were a handful of other swimmers, all parents and children, and Darley lowered herself in from the ladder, observing the unspoken pool etiquette, allowing a few feet of distance between them and herself, nodding hello to the parents as they dragged their tiny offspring around on chewed-up foam kickboards. Poppy and Hatcher had no such sense of decorum and lunged gleefully along, darting between parents and children, diving for toys at the knees of strangers, kicking up giant splashes that drenched everyone near them. Darley looked around the place, surprised anew at just how run-down her gym was. The tiles of the pool were cracked in places, a strange showerhead with a chain was positioned in the middle of the room, prison style, and a hot tub filled with old people burbled over near the lifeguard. Since the building next door housed apartments for the elderly, the gym was crawling with octogenarians, and as she watched them soak in the Jacuzzi she often felt she was watching outtakes from the movie Cocoon.

Darley had climbed out to fetch the kids’ goggles when the lifeguard blew her whistle. “Up! Up!” Darley looked over in a panic and Hatcher was floating facedown in the pool. She started to run toward him, but he heard the whistle and quickly lifted his head, flipping over onto his back.

“Hatcher, what are you doing?”

“It’s the dead man’s float, mom,” he laughed.

“Well, it’s confusing for the lifeguard so stop doing it.”

“Okaaaay,” he giggled and squirmed his body to the side of the pool to grab his goggles.

Five minutes later the lifeguard blew her whistle again. Poppy was facedown. Darley grabbed her and flipped her over. “Stop it,” she hissed, and Poppy laughed. They played this game three more times before the lifeguard asked them to leave.

Humiliated, Darley marched them back out into the hallway, thin towels draped around their shivering bodies. She usually dried them off by the pool and wrapped them in fresh warm towels for the journey, but she was pissed. “What is up with you guys? Why did you keep doing that even after the lifeguard asked you to stop?”

“Aiden says that drowning is the worst way to die,” Hatcher explained seriously, his voice echoing in the long, tiled hallway.

“He says your lungs fill with water,” Poppy agreed.

“You guys know how to swim. That’s why we taught you. So that you won’t drown. Is that what you’re afraid of? Are you afraid you’ll drown? Because you won’t.”

“No, we’re not afraid.”

“We just wanted to feel what it was like. To die.” Poppy smiled sweetly.

“You’re not going to die until you’re a hundred,” Darley said firmly, ushering them up the final stairway and into the showers, blasting the warm water and scrubbing their heads with shampoo before sending them into the locker room to dress themselves. As Darley peeled off her wet swimsuit, she let the warm water cascade down her face. If her kids got her thrown out of Eastern Athletic, she would be seriously annoyed. The only thing more embarrassing than belonging to the most decrepit gym in Brooklyn was being exiled from it for antisocial behavior.

When Darley emerged from the shower, the children were sitting on a bench, fully clothed, staring at the naked old women newly released from aerobics class. The women chatted about their instructor, about a classmate who was hosting family from New Jersey, about someone whose husband was ill and whom they would visit with cake and flowers. As they chatted, they folded their damp tops into plastic bags, they stretched shower caps over their fluffy white hair, then bent low to place their sneakers under the benches, exposing naked buttocks. Darley averted her eyes, mildly horrified. Sure, she had given birth to two babies and her body looked nothing like it had six years ago, but when she saw these wrinkled women, their breasts low on their chests, their thighs marbled with cellulite, varicose veins and puckered scars tattooing their skin, she couldn’t imagine ever possibly looking so ancient. Or being willing to appear naked in public if she did.

“Don’t stare,” Darley whispered, and her children snapped their eyes to her, as though woken from a trance.

“Are they almost a hundred?” Poppy asked loudly.

“Shhhh.” Darley died a thousand deaths inside. “I don’t know. Why don’t you guys watch Netflix on my phone while I get our stuff.” Having children was possibly the most mortifying experience of her life.

There were hours to go until dinner, so Darley fetched the children’s scooters from under the gym stairwell and herded them to the playground on Pierrepoint. She found an empty bench and retreated into her phone, while Poppy and Hatcher set about exploring the grossest corners of the park, the pile of damp sticks by the door of the public restroom, the discarded plastic baggies in the drain by the water fountain, the half-broken ginkgo fruits at the base of the tree, releasing their stinky smell. She would have to give them a second bath when they got home, but it was worth it to spin the hands of the clock, to arrive at another Sunday night, an entire week of school and freedom before her.

She was torturing herself by reading her class alumni notes when she noticed her sister-in-law sitting on a bench on the other side of the iron fence. “Sasha!” she called, waving her over. Sasha startled and then gathered up her papers and let herself into the playground. She was wearing what looked like men’s jeans and a black T-shirt, and while Darley knew that outfit would make her look like a Johnny Cash impersonator, somehow on Sasha it all worked. She had shiny auburn hair cut to her ears, pale freckled skin, pretty pink lips, and a petite, slim build that would have made her a great squash player. Darley couldn’t help it. Years of living with her mother and sister had turned her into the kind of person who evaluated a woman’s build based on her ideal athletic endeavors. It was insane, really.

“Oh, hi!” Sasha laughed. “I didn’t even see you guys arrive.”

“We were just thrown out of the Eastern Athletic swimming pool for pretending to drown.” Darley cringed.

“You should probably stop pretending to drown. Sets a bad example for the kids.”

“It’s just swimming is so hard when I’ve been day drinking.” Darley snickered and patted the bench next to her for Sasha to sit. Sasha seemed a little surprised, but Darley was desperate for adult conversation so she smiled her most welcoming smile. They looked out across the playground, where Poppy and Hatcher were crouching over the drain by the water fountain, taking turns dipping long sticks through the slots and pulling up dank piles of scummy leaves.

“What were you up to?”

“Oh, I was messing around with my sketchbook.” Sasha gestured at a spiral-bound pad.

“Can I see?”

Sasha handed the notebook over and Darley leafed through it. The drawings were mostly portraits of people. She flipped past an old man playing a trumpet on a park bench, a couple cuddling on a stoop, a lady smoking out a window. She turned the page and saw her brother, his feet slung over a chair as he read a book. It was uncanny how well she had captured the funny thing he did with his mouth when he read, the way he seemed to hold a book as though he were about to drop it. How strange to see a person she loved so dearly through the eyes of someone else.

“These are incredible, Sasha. You went to Cooper Union, right?”

“Yep. And now I spend my days arguing with clients over which photo of a pillowcase will look sexier in their Christmas catalog. I’m really putting my degree to use.”

“I got my MBA so that I could broker corporate acquisitions, and instead I spend my days arguing with children about whether chicken nuggets and chicken fingers represent two different food groups,” Darley said. She felt the way she always did whenever she mentioned business school: proud she had gone, embarrassed she had done nothing since then. She wasn’t sure why she was volunteering this to her sister-in-law, of all people.

“I mean, they kind of do,” Sasha said. “Nuggets are for school lunches and chicken fingers are for eating at the sports bar when you realize you’re drunk and it’s only halftime.”

“Mmm, yes, the five food groups: drunk, sober, hungover, school lunch, and bar food.”

“I feel like you’re missing the Monday food group.”

“What is that?”

“The heathy one where you make everyone eat rice and broccoli and salad because you feel so gross from eating pizza and donuts all weekend.”

“Oh, right, the Monday food group. That’s the saddest food group, full of baby carrots and regret.” Darley looked out across the playground, laughing quietly. “This girl I know posts her daily caloric intake on Instagram alongside pictures of slimy chickpeas and plain chicken breasts.”

“That’s so embarrassing,” Sasha said, horrified.

“I know! I literally had to screenshot it and send it to all my friends and ask if she had meant to make her posts public! We contemplated an intervention!”

“But you didn’t intervene?”

“No, we decided it was kinder to just keep texting screenshots behind her back.”

“Oh, right, right. Totally agree.” Sasha nodded seriously. Her phone dinged and she looked down. “Oh, God, yikes.”

“What?”

“My mom texted that there is a bat in the basement and my dad is trying to go catch it. The dog is freaking out.”

“Can’t bats have rabies?”

“I’m texting her back. ‘MOM. DO NOT LET DAD IN THE BASEMENT. CALL SOMEONE.’ ”

A moment later Sasha’s phone dinged again and she groaned. Her mother had texted a picture of someone wearing a hockey goalie’s face mask and gloves, holding a fishing net.

“Is that your dad?”

“It’s my brother, thank God.”

Suddenly a raindrop landed on Darley’s arm. Poppy and Hatcher ran over, dragging their slimy sticks behind them.

“Mom! It’s raining!”

“Okay, put your helmets on,” Darley sighed. Now they’d have to battle out the rest of the day confined to the apartment. The afternoon stretched before her as long as a cross-country car trip, or a jury-duty summons.

“Hey, come over to Pineapple!” Sasha offered.

“You guys want to go to the limestone?” Darley asked the kids, forgetting for a moment that they could say something socially horrendous like “No, Sasha’s house smells weird,” or “Only if they have better snacks than we do,” but instead they surprised her, jumping up and down and beaming at Sasha. Her kids did love looking through her old stuff.

They followed Sasha out of the playground and up Willow Street to Pineapple. They parked their scooters in the foyer, shucked their muddy sneakers, and carefully laid down their gooey sticks, while Darley hung their swim bag on a hook before entering the apartment.

“Guys, I have a bunch of art stuff out in my room if you want to draw.” Sasha ushered the kids up the stairs. “Is that okay with you? If they go?”

“Sure.” Darley smiled. She was not going to object to her kids playing independently. Sasha tipped her chin to the kitchen and Darley followed. She pulled out a bottle of white from the fridge and poured some for each of them. The rain slapped the glass doors to the yard.

“I should text Malcolm.” Darley pulled out her phone. “Let’s see, his golf game should be over by now.” Darley dashed off a quick note letting him know the kids got kicked out of the pool and they were at the Pineapple Street house. She then put her phone facedown on the table and apologized. “Sorry about that.”

“Malcolm’s playing golf?”

“Yeah, with some business school friends in Texas.”

“Do you guys talk a lot while he travels?”

“Like four hundred times a day,” Darley laughed. “Do you and Cord talk all day?”

“No, I think Cord goes into beast mode when he’s at the office and basically forgets he is a human. He comes back all starving from skipping lunch and then eats a whole bag of chips before dinner.”

“Does he actually like working with Dad?”

“He loves it. He and your dad are two peas in a pod.” Sasha smiled. “Is it hard having Malcolm travel so much for work? Do you miss him?”

Darley paused. Even though Malcolm had been let go from Deutsche Bank weeks and weeks ago, nobody in the family knew. Darley had decided it was best this way. But the weekend had been so long, so lonely, and keeping the secret had started to weigh on her. “Don’t tell Cord, but Malcolm was fired. He’s interviewing for a new job.”

“He was fired?” Sasha asked, putting her wineglass down on the counter with a clink.

“It wasn’t his fault—an analyst killed a deal and Malcolm took the fall.”

“Shit. He must be heartbroken. I know how much he loves his job.”

Darley was surprised to feel tears spring to her eyes. It was like Sasha actually understood why it scared her so much. “He is heartbroken. And banking is brutal. You make one misstep and you’re persona non grata.”

“Is he interviewing with another bank?”

“No, he’s looking at private equity. But he just doesn’t have connections there.” Darley took a deep drink of wine.

“Don’t your parents know people who could help?”

“We’re not telling them,” Darley said firmly.

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated.” Darley didn’t want to talk about her parents, how she was afraid that on some secret level, a level they could never even acknowledge to themselves, they might have welcomed Malcolm more readily to their family because he was financially secure. Once his money was gone, once the shine of success had tarnished, would they feel quite the same way? “Promise me you won’t mention it to Cord. I’ll tell him all about it once Malcolm has a new job. I just don’t want to put that pressure on Malcolm right now.”

“Of course.” Sasha nodded. “No problem. And he’ll be hired in no time. He’s a genius.” Her phone dinged and she looked down. “Christ on a cracker.” She showed Darley the screen, her father and brother holding the small brown bat in a net, victorious.

“Unreal,” Darley murmured, trying to picture Chip doing anything with a net other than skimming bugs off the swimming pool at Spyglass.

“Maybe Malcolm won’t have to travel so much with his next job,” Sasha mused.

“Do you know my friend Priya Singh? Both she and her husband work at Goldman, and I literally have no idea how they even got pregnant with their second. I don’t think they ever see each other.”

“That sounds so lonely.”

“There’s that mom at the Henry Street School who married the NBA star who got traded to Los Angeles. Those kids only see their dad on TV.”

“I mean, that’s still pretty cool, though,” Sasha said. “I would not be sad to be married to a basketball star.”

“True. They make a ton of money, then they retire in their thirties and you can just stop working and hang out together.”

“I don’t think Cord will ever retire. He loves his work.”

“I feel like there are all these guys who go into finance, and they have grand plans to make it big and then retire at thirty, but then no matter how much money they make they see that if they keep going, they could just make more. Like, there’s never a moment when they think, Oh, I have ten million dollars and that’s enough.”

“No, because everyone they know is also making that kind of money and spending that kind of money, and even when they have more than they could realistically need in a lifetime, it doesn’t feel like they have enough.”

“Totally,” Darley agreed, finishing her wine.

Sasha reached over and poured her more. She turned on the oven and pulled two pizzas out of the freezer. “Should I make pizza and salad?”

“That’s all the kids eat.”

When the pizza was done, she called the kids down and they sat at the granite island and devoured slice after slice while arguing animatedly about invisibility cloaks. Hatcher thought they were real, but Poppy was unsure. After dinner they moved to the sofas in the parlor and Sasha put on music. The kids shimmied around and piled cushions on the floor and played hot lava, while Darley and Sasha laughed and drank and occasionally tossed a rogue pillow at an exuberant child. Her mother would kill them if she saw what they were doing with the governor’s furniture.

Somehow, it was suddenly eight thirty and Darley realized they had missed bath time and overshot bedtime, and the dreaded Sunday afternoon had passed in a happy blur. She snapped helmets on the kids and gathered their sticks, and as they set off into the warm evening she gripped Sasha’s arm seriously. “This was the most fun.”

“I’m so glad you all got kicked out of the pool so we could do this.” Sasha grinned.

As they swept down the damp sidewalks back to their apartment, Darley pulled out her phone. She had a missed FaceTime from Malcolm and a text.

Hope you’re surviving the Sunday scaries . . .

Darley was a little drunk and the letters swam, so she closed one eye and texted back.

So fun. Had wine. Baby carrots and regret tomrw.

There were things you could do with family that you just couldn’t do with friends: You could let them see you wearing the same outfit three days in a row. You could invite them over for lunch and then mostly ignore them as you finally got off hold with the internet provider. You could have an entire conversation while wearing Crest Whitestrips. Suddenly, with her new friendship with Sasha, Darley felt her guard drop. Sasha was funny and easygoing and genuinely enjoyed spending time with Poppy and Hatcher. She worked freelancer hours and was often free to meet Darley in the park midday, joining her and the kids for bagels at second breakfast, rides on the carousel, ice cream from the truck. She was silly with the kids in the same way Cord was, pretending her sunglasses gave her X-ray vision, insisting she understood what the barking dogs were saying when they ran past, engaging in long and serious discussions about the relative merits of a pet Pegasus or unicorn.

Darley could tell it made Cord happy to see his wife and sister having fun together, and he invited Darley into their world of private jokes and goofy theories. They had a shared suspicion that the terrible butcher shop in the Hotel St. George was really a drug front and peppered Darley with evidence.

“They have like four cuts of meat and a bag of dried pasta. That literally cannot be their business model,” Cord said.

“And the guy who works there seems annoyed whenever you try to buy anything, like you’re messing up the stage,” agreed Sasha.

“You guys,” Darley interrupted, shaking her head. “This is New York City. Nobody needs a drug front. If you want drugs you just order them from the app on your phone.”

“Which app is that?” Cord teased.

“I mean, I don’t actually know!” Darley had to concede.

Sasha had never eaten Korean barbecue, so Darley decided they’d go to the new place that had opened in Gowanus—a sleek, wood-paneled restaurant nestled between a moving company and a mechanic—and served tiki bar cocktails and blood sausage. Malcolm was obsessed with their short ribs, and after six phone calls Darley managed to score a coveted Saturday night reservation for four. But it turned out that Cord had the Union Club cognac tasting that night. She called back, and after much begging and pleading got a reservation three weeks later, but then realized Malcolm had plans for his mother’s birthday. “It’s like they’re Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne,” Darley lamented to Sasha.

“Mom, they can’t be both.” Poppy rolled her eyes. They were sitting on the bench outside Joe Coffee waiting for their order.

“Right! Because they are secretly the same person! Like a superhero and his alter ego!”

“No, Mom, Clark Kent is Superman and Bruce Wayne is Batman. They’re two different characters.”

“Oh. Well, which one is Daddy?”

“Probably Bruce Wayne,” Poppy said thoughtfully. “And you’re Pennyworth.”

“Who’s Pennyworth? The cute girl reporter?”

“No, Pennyworth is his butler. He’s old,” Hatcher said.

“Oh, cool, cool.” Darley nodded and made a horrified face at Sasha over Hatcher’s head. “Because I’m old.”

Darley hadn’t realized how lonely she had been before. So many of her friends were stretched thin between their jobs and parenting, their weekends full of soccer and furtive emailing, never truly caught up on work. She had her brother and sister, she had her parents, she had Malcolm’s parents and Malcolm when he was home, but they all had client dinners and tennis matches, they all had Venetian-themed anniversary parties, golf outings, a zillion things to do that were more fun that watching the kids ride their bikes in circles for hours in Squibb Park. Of course, Sasha had more interesting things to do too. Sasha had work, and she had her art school friends, but she was just down the street, and rather than eat lunch alone at her desk staring into her computer, now she chose to swing by Darley’s with a salad on a random Wednesday afternoon.

On warm weekends Darley and Malcolm loaded the kids up in the Land Rover with Cord and Sasha crammed in the third row and drove out to the Spyglass house so that they could hit balls around the tennis court and grill hot dogs. They stayed up late drinking wine and playing cards after the kids went to bed. Chip and Tilda were usually there too, but always engaged with some dinner party or event at their country club, traipsing in close to midnight, tipsy and in high spirits, her mother making her father bring out the cognac so they could catch up and gossip. Somehow Tilda always had the best gossip after these parties—about minor New York celebrities, about board members at the various private schools, about which co-ops were gleefully refusing entry to the Hollywood actors and actresses who flocked to the leafy streets of Brooklyn Heights like parakeets, bright and noisy and utterly out of their element.

Now that Darley was on Team Sasha, she saw how awkward their family could be to an outsider, how tricky it might seem to make sense of their little clan. She knew about Sasha and Malcolm’s little inside joke, whispering “NMF” when they felt left out, but Darley realized she could just extend a hand to include Sasha, and she could have done it ages ago. She reminded Sasha to pack tennis whites for Spyglass. She passed her a coaster when she saw her about to put a tumbler on her mother’s coffee table. She made a frantic zipping motion by her mouth when Sasha mentioned a real estate reality show in front of her father.

They were eating family dinner at Cecconi’s in Dumbo one night when the vegetable soup arrived in a bread bowl. As Sasha ripped off a chunk of the bowl to eat, Darley saw her mother look at her, goggle-eyed.

“You aren’t going to eat the bowl, are you?” Tilda asked in surprise. To Darley’s knowledge her mother hadn’t eaten bread since the 1970s.

Sasha paused, the bread halfway to her mouth, dripping broth. “The soup soaked into it,” she faltered, and the table came to a terrible standstill.

Darley had ordered the soup as well and, full with the knowledge that only she could make this moment right, she ripped off a big piece of her own bowl. “Oh, but it’s kind of wonderful,” she insisted. Then, pivoting with the grace of a Lincoln Center ballerina, she asked, “Have any of you been to the new Italian restaurant on Henry Street? I heard the food is terrible, but the new James Bond is an investor.” Darley continued to enthusiastically dismantle her bread bowl as Tilda jumped at the bait, regaling them with the story of James Bond’s wife’s trouble with her brownstone renovation, and Cord gave his big sister a quick look, tweaking the corner of his lip in a private smile of thanks.