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deal; she knew girls at school who did it all the time. She liked to think that if her parents found out she bought condoms, they’d be proud of her for being so responsible and mature.
    What would probably happen, though, was that her mom would feel betrayed and her dad would just shrug and head for the club.

Seven
    W HEN B RIAN STRODE INTO THE LIVING ROOM F RIDAY NIGHT , M EG SAW that he’d showered before coming home. Comb marks angled through his thinning dark hair. A lightly starched golf shirt—not the same one he would have worn while playing—was tucked into tailored navy shorts. His waistline swelled over his belt like the top of a muffin. She had never thought him unattractive. His style, though, wasn’t her preference. She liked a more rugged look. Less refined, more adventurous. Brian was so…tidy, she thought. Orderly. Like their home, like their life.
    She put aside the stack of blue notebooks, which she’d forgotten in the car until this evening. She’d been trying unsuccessfully to free them from the string, wanting to make sure they weren’t anything important before putting them in a box for Goodwill.
    “Been at the club?” she asked Brian, to snag his attention. She needed to make an effort more often; in two years, Savannah would be off to college, and then where would they be? Familiar but distant occupants of their six-thousand-square-foot, professionally decorated house. A house with too many unused rooms as it was; how hollow things would be with Savannah away.
    Brian stopped and set his gym bag on the polished hardwood floor. “Yep,” he said, perching on the side of an armchair opposite her. “Got nine holes in, with those clients from Germany I was telling you about the other day. They’re really bad—don’t know a wedge from an iron—but good-natured about it. We stopped keeping score.”
    Meg nodded, empathetic to the German men’s plight; she hardly knew the differences between golf clubs herself. She supposed she
should
know, golf being Brian’s life outside of work. It just didn’t interest her, and her mind was crowded enough with the things she
had
to know.
    Perhaps he understood this; he never bothered to discuss the particulars of his golf games. Their conversations molded around common interests: the house, Savannah, their families, their careers. A movie, if by long odds they’d seen it together—or separately, if one of them was traveling and caught it on the plane or late at night in a hotel. Sometimes, now that Savannah was watching many of the same movies, she joined the conversation.
If
they had all seen the movie and were all in one room or one vehicle at the same time, an occurrence about as rare as conjoined twins.
    Manisha Patel, Meg’s partner, assured her that her reality was nothing unusual; Manisha’s family’s worked the same way, which was like that of most other families they knew, and was often the subject of talk shows Meg came across late at night, times when she couldn’t sleep. She and Brian and Savannah were planets orbiting a common sun, occasionally swinging into close proximity. Held together by the gravitational pull of a shared address, they had little in common with what had once made the “traditional” family. She felt guilty about this as regularly as she felt defensive about it, and figured she’d come to terms with the whole muddy issue just about the time Savannah was grown and gone.
    “You look refreshed,” Meg said. “I’m going to hit the shower in a minute myself. But it feels so good to just sit here.”
    Brian smiled in that way he had, slightly condescending and self-affirming.
He
could put in a full, hectic day and still have the energy to entertain clients
and
play nine holes of golf, that’s what she imagined him thinking. He was never overtly critical, but still, she
felt
his judgment,
felt
the comparison—it was his nature to think that way. She half expected him to give her a Team Hamilton pep talk.
    “Was