He looked at her chart again. “How about the bad dreams?”

“They’ve gotten better. She still doesn’t like loud noises.” Or movies in theaters, or any place—like the paint-your-own-pottery shop or the library at storytime—where more than two or three people might be talking at once. I sighed. “It’s like she feels everything more than other kids.”

“And maybe she does,” he replied. “Like I said, though, most kids do grow out of it. By the time she’s ten she’ll be begging you for drum lessons.”

“It’s so hard,” I said. Then I shut my mouth. I hated how I sounded when I complained about Ellie, knowing that there were women who wanted to get pregnant and couldn’t, that there were children in the world with real, serious problems that went far beyond reacting badly to loud noises and the occasional rash. There were single mothers, women with far less money and far fewer resources than I had. Who was I, with my big house and my great job, to complain about anything?

Dr. McCarthy put his hand on my forearm and looked at me with such kindness that I found myself, absurdly, almost crying.

“So tell me. What are you doing to take care of yourself?”

I thought for a split second about lying, giving him some story about actually attending yoga classes instead of just paying for them, or how I was taking Pilates, when, in fact, all I had was a gift certificate from two birthdays ago languishing in my dresser drawer. Instead I said, “Nothing, really. There just isn’t time.”

He adjusted his stethoscope. “You’ve got to make time. It’s important. You know how they tell you on planes, in case of an emergency, the adults should put their oxygen masks on first? You’re not going to be any good to anyone if you’re not taking care of yourself.” His blue eyes, behind his glasses, looked so gentle, and his posture was relaxed, as if he had nowhere to go and nothing more pressing to do than stand there all afternoon and listen to my silly first-world problems. “Do you want to talk to someone?” I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk to someone. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to go to his office—it was small but cozy, with cluttered bookshelves, and a desk stacked high with charts, and a comfortably worn leather couch against the wall. He’d offer me a seat and a cup of tea, and ask me what was wrong, what was really wrong, and I would tell him: about Dave, about Ellie, about my dad, about my mom. About the pills. I’d tuck myself under a blanket and take a nap while the volunteers kept Ellie amused in the waiting room and Dr. McCarthy came up with a plan for how to fix me.

Instead, I swallowed hard. “I’m okay,” I said, in a slightly hoarse voice, and I gave him a smile, the same one I’d given my mother on my way out of the taxi on my eighth birthday.

“Are you sure? I know how hard this part can be. Even if you can find twenty minutes a day to go for a walk, or just sit quietly . . .”

Twenty minutes. It didn’t sound like much. Not until I started thinking about work, and how time-consuming writing five blog posts a week turned out to be, and how on top of my paying job I’d volunteered to redesign the website for Stonefield’s annual silent auction. There were the mortgage payments, which still felt like an astonishing sum to part with each month, and the Examiner, where it was rumored there’d be another round of layoffs soon. There was the laundry that never got folded, the workouts that went undone, the organic vegetables that would rot and liquefy in the fridge because, after eight hours at my desk and another two hours of being screamed at by my daughter because she couldn’t find the one specific teddy bear she wanted among the half-dozen teddy bears she owned, I couldn’t handle finding a recipe and preparing a meal and washing the dishes when I was done. We lived on grab-and-heat meals from Wegmans, Chinese takeout, frozen pizzas, and, if I was feeling particularly guilty on a Sunday afternoon, some kind of casserole, for which I’d double the recipe and freeze a batch.

Dr. McCarthy tucked Ellie’s folder under his arm and looked down at the magazine in my hand. “Are you reading one of those ‘How to Be Better in Bed’ things?” he asked. I gave a weak smile and closed the magazine so he couldn’t see what I was really reading. This was craziness. I didn’t have a problem. I couldn’t.

He glanced over my head, at the clock on the wall. From behind the exam-room door, I could hear Ellie and the medical student singing “Castle on a Cloud.” “Nobody shouts or talks too loud . . . Not in my castle on a cloud.”

I gave him another smile. He gave my arm a final squeeze. “Take care of yourself,” he said, and then he was gone.

I pushed the magazine into the depths of my purse. I got Ellie into her clothes, smoothing out the seam of her socks, buttoning her dress, re-braiding her hair. I held her hand when we crossed the street, paid for parking, and then, before I drove southwest to Federal Donuts for the hot chocolate I’d promised my daughter, I reached for the Altoids tin in my purse.

No, I thought, and remembered the quiz. Have you ever planned not to use that day but done it anyway? What excuse did I have for taking pills?

Maybe my mother had been cold and inattentive . . . but it had been the 1970s, before “parent” became a verb, when mothers routinely stuck their toddlers in playpens while they mixed themselves a martini or lit a Virginia Slim. So I had a big house in the burbs. Wasn’t that what every woman was supposed to want? I had a job I was good at, a job I liked, even if it felt sometimes like the stress was unbearable; I had a lovely daughter, and, really, was being a little sensitive such a big deal? I was fine, I thought. Everything was fine. But even as I was thinking it, my fingers were opening the little box, locating the chalky white oval, and delivering it, like Communion, to the waiting space beneath my tongue. I heard the pill cracking between my teeth as I chewed, winced as the familiar bitterness flooded my mouth, and imagined as I started the car that I could feel the chemical sweetness untying my knotted muscles, slowing my heartbeat, silencing the endless monkey-chatter of my mind, letting my lungs expand enough for a deep breath.

At the corner of Sixth and Chestnut, I saw a woman on the sidewalk. Her face was red. Her feet bulged out of laceless sneakers, and there was a paper cup in her hands. Puckered lips worked against toothless gums. Her hands were dirty and swollen, her body wrapped in layers of sweaters and topped with a stained down coat. Behind her stood a shopping cart filled with trash bags. A little dog was perched on the topmost bag, curled up in a threadbare blue sweater.

Ellie slowly read each word of her sign out loud. “ ‘Homeless. Need help. God bless.’ Mommy, what is ‘homeless’?”

“It means she doesn’t have a place to live.” I was glad Dave wasn’t in the car. I could imagine his response: It means she doesn’t want to work to take care of herself, and thinks it’s someone else’s job to pay for what she needs. I’d known my husband was more conservative than I was when I married him, but, in the ten years since, it seemed like he’d decided that anything that went wrong in his life or anyone else’s was the liberals’ fault.

Ellie considered this. “Maybe she could live in our guest room.”

I bit back my immediate reply, which was, No, honey, your daddy lives there. That had been true for at least the past six weeks. Maybe longer. I didn’t want to think about it. Instead I said, “She probably needs a special kind of help, not just a place to stay.”

“What kind of help?”

Blessedly, the light turned green. I pulled into traffic and drove to the doughnut shop, feeling the glow of the narcotic envelop me and hold me tight. Leaving the shop, I caught a glimpse of myself in the window, and compared what I saw—a white woman of medium height, in a tan camel-hair trench coat, new-this-season walnut leather riding boots, straightened hair lying smoothly over her shoulders—with the woman on the corner. A little makeup, I thought, in the expansive, embracing manner I tended to think in when I had a pill or two in me, and I could even be pretty. And even if I wasn’t, I thought, as I drove us back home, as Ellie sang along to Carly Rae Jepsen and the city where I’d been so happy slipped away in my rearview mirror, I was a world away from the woman we’d seen. That woman—she was what addiction looked like. Not me. Not me.

TWO

My alarm cheeped at six-fifteen. Without opening my eyes, I crab-walked my hand across the bedside table, located my throbbing phone, and swiped it into silence. Then I held still, flat on my back, listening to Ellie snore beside me as I fought the same mental battle I fought every morning: Exercise or sleep?

I should exercise, I told myself. The day after Ellie’s doctor’s appointment the fact-checker had called me and said the story about Ladiesroom would show up today on the Wall Street Journal’s website, and would be in the printed paper tomorrow. I’d told Dave it was coming, but we’d barely discussed it. I didn’t want him to think I was bragging, or that I was drawing a distinction between us—Dave, who wrote stories, and me, who had somehow become one of the written-about. Dave hadn’t noticed my nerves, how I’d picked at my dinner and been awake most of the night, worrying that the picture would be terrible and that the world, and everyone I knew in it, would wake up and bear witness to precisely how many chins I actually had.

Lying underneath the down comforter, I touched my hips, feeling the spread, then moved my hands up to the jiggly flesh of my belly. My waistline had been the only thing that kept me from resembling a teapot in profile, but, unfortunately, it had never really reappeared in the months, then years, after Ellie’s birth. I’d always told myself that I’d get around to losing the baby weight when things calmed down, but that had never happened, and the baby was now almost six.

I could see Ellie’s eyes moving underneath her lavender eyelids, and then Dave, with his pillow in his hands, dressed in pajamas that he wore buttoned to his chin, creeping into the room. Quickly, I shut my eyes so he’d think I was still asleep and we wouldn’t have to talk. It had been like this for longer than I liked to think about—every night he’d sleep in the guest room, and every morning he’d come tiptoeing back to the marital bed, the reverse of a teenage boy sneaking out through his beloved’s window. The idea was that when Ellie woke up and came to greet us, she’d see a happy couple, not two people who communicated mostly through texts about picking up milk and putting out the recycling. The good news was, Ellie generally showed up in the middle of the night, half-asleep and not in a position to notice anything.

Dave settled himself on the far side of the bed, arranging his pillows just so. I turned on my side, remembering how it had been when we’d first moved in together, how his first act after waking would be to spoon me, his chest tight against my back, his legs cupping mine, how he’d scratch his deliciously stubbled cheeks against the back of my neck and whisper that it couldn’t be morning, it was still early, we didn’t have to move, not yet. These days, he was more likely to open his eyes and fling himself, facedown, to the carpet for a quick set of planks and pushups before his run.

I opened my eyes and considered the clothes I’d left folded on the dresser: Lululemon yoga pants and an Athleta tank top in a pretty shade of pink, with my sneakers and a running bra and a pristine pair of white ankle socks beside them. All good, except I’d laid out the shoes and the clothes on Sunday night, and it was now Thursday morning, and all I’d done with the cute outfit was admire it from the safe remove of my bed.

Five more minutes, I decided, then reached for my cell phone, scanning my e-mail. As usual, Sarah had been up for hours. “pos col?” she’d asked—Sarah-ese for “possible column”—in a message sent an hour earlier that linked to the Twitter feed of a prominent comic-book creator. When asked how to write strong female characters, he’d answered, “Be sure not to give them weenies.” “So transwomen are out?” one of his followers had shot back, touching off a lengthy debate about biology and genitals and who qualified as female. Among her “pos col” contenders, Sarah had also included an update on the trial of the celebrity chef being sued by her (male) assistant for sexual harassment, and a profile of the showrunner of an Emmy Award–winning soap opera.