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show—it’s funny?”
    “I think so,” Georgie said. “We’re not moving as fast as we should be.”
    “We never are. We’ll get there.”
    “Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes. When she looked up again, Seth was smiling his just-for-her smile. It was smaller than the ones he gave everyone else. More eyes. Less teeth.
    “Go home,” he said. “Get some sleep. You still look exhausted.”
    She was.
    So she did.

CHAPTER 5
     
    W hen Georgie got home, the front door was locked. She fumbled for a minute with her keys.
    She’d left a few of the lights on, so the house wasn’t dark—it just felt dark. Georgie realized she was tiptoeing. She cleared her throat. “It’s just me,” she said out loud, to prove that she could.
    She tried to remember the last time she’d come home to an empty house, and couldn’t. Not this house.
    They’d moved out to Calabasas when Georgie was pregnant with Noomi; their old house, a squat, mint green bungalow in Silver Lake, only had two bedrooms, and there were more tattoo parlors and karaoke bars in their neighborhood than kids.
    Georgie missed it. Not the tattoo parlors and the karaoke bars . . . She and Neal never went out much, even before Alice and Noomi. But she missed the house. How small it was. How close. She missed the scrubby excuse for a front yard, and the crooked jacaranda tree that used to drop sticky purple flowers onto her old Jetta every spring.
    She and Neal had decorated that house together. They’d gone to the hardware store every weekend for a year to argue about paint. Georgie would always choose the most saturated color on the card.
    “You can’t always pick the bottom color,” Neal would say.
    “But the bottom color makes all the other colors look dull.”
    “You’re looking at them wrong.”
    “How is that possible?”
    Neal almost always let Georgie win; their house in Silver Lake looked like Rainbow Brite lived there—and you could tell which walls Georgie had painted, because she was lousy at edges and corners.
    They both had jobs then. Neal worked weekends. So there were plenty of days and nights when Georgie had their old house to herself. She’d watch TV shows that Neal would never watch with her. (Everything on The WB.) And then, when he got home, he’d climb over her on the couch and bother her until it was time to make dinner.
    That was back when Georgie still pretended to help. When she’d hang out in the kitchen with him and drink wine while she watched him slice vegetables.
    “You could do this for a living,” she’d say. “You could cut tomatoes in a tomato-cutting commercial, that’s how good you are.”
    Then Neal would chop extra loudly and wave the knife over the tomato slices with a flourish.
    “I’m serious. You could be an Iron Chef.”
    “That or work at Applebee’s.”
    Georgie had a regular spot on the kitchen counter, and Neal worked around it. He’d pour her too much wine—and feed her pieces of things before the rest of dinner was ready, blowing on the fork until the bite was cool enough. . . .
    How many years ago was that? Eight? Ten?
    Georgie dropped her phone and keys onto the coffee table, on a stack of Noomi’s picture books, and wandered into the kitchen. The plate of salmon stir-fry that Neal had made two nights ago was still in the refrigerator. She hadn’t felt like eating it then, even though she’d been starving. She didn’t bother to heat it up now, just grabbed a fork and brought it out to the living room, sitting on the couch and turning on the TV for light. There were two new episodes of Jeff’d Up on the DVR, a rerun and an hour-long Christmas special.
    The Christmas special had been a pain in the ass to film. The script had Jeff and Trev both secretly bonding with a stray dog they were pretending to hate. Jeff would kick the dog out of the house, then Trev would let the dog in, then Jeff would go looking for it, trying to sneak it in himself, then he’d get caught and kick it out again. The