sparkly stickers and colorful page decorations—she was supposed to be successful and maybe even married by now. She was supposed to live in a house with a deep backyard, with a dog or two and maybe even kids. She was supposed to be a member of giving circles and organizations that mattered, to champion causes like climate protection and humane immigration policies, and somewhere along the line have turned into a gourmet cook and be a highly sought-after doubles partner at the tennis club. She was supposed to be at the top of her professional game, maybe even being considered for partner at DBS.
But the reality was that in spite of her hard work, last year she’d been organized out of a job, her boyfriend of six months had decided he wanted to date other people—maybe all the people, she wasn’t clear on that, but specifically not her—her parents had split up and divorced and dragged their grown children down that path with them, and her sister was melting down a little more each day with her young kids and her chronically absent husband.
The truth was that Carly was beginning to flounder. She’d be eating out of dumpsters if it weren’t for Victor and her other client, Gordon; but, make no mistake, neither of them were paying her enough to cover her expenses and sometimes working for Victor felt like a full-time babysitting job. Her applications for positions in New York firms seemed to be disappearing into black holes.
If she allowed herself to dwell on it, she would plainly see that not only was she in the middle of a lot of family drama, but she was living a lifestyle she really couldn’t maintain any longer. She was on the verge of losing everything, and if that wasn’t enough stress, she was desperate for a day where she had nothing to do.
A single day.
A day of solitude during which she never changed out of her pajamas and lay in bed, flipping back and forth between Bravo and HGTV and Hallmark—she did watch TV when she had nothing else to do—while she ate from a giant plate of nachos, and someone would come by and quietly do her laundry and mop her floors and clean her toilets, then slip away like a sprite. When could she have that day?
Her life was running a little short of desperate. Like today, she’d had a game plan: follow up with two publications she was hoping would feature Victor’s work; follow up on two job applications she’d submitted last month and submit at least two more job applications; find an art show for Gordon to attend; and, oh, while she was at it—find her dog. But there was never a moment of solitude. Every hour was interrupted.
In the middle of a phone call with a magazine, her sister, Mia, had beeped her. Not once but several times, distracting Carly so much that she wasn’t sure what she’d said to the magazine in the end. When she finally answered Mia’s call, it was with a curt “What?”
“Don’t yell at me! I’m having a horrible day and I can’t find Mom, Carly. I’m afraid something awful has happened.”
It sounded like something awful was happening in Mia’s house. Carly could hear her niece and nephews screaming in the background. Early on, Mia and her husband, Will, had adopted the free-range parenting style, which meant, Mia had explained when she was pregnant with her oldest, that they wanted their children to do and be what came naturally to them and without intervention. Mia had worked for the state Department of Education before she’d married and started having kids, and had read all the studies about effective parenting techniques. But after one particularly bad Saturday that ended with all three kids breaking out in poison ivy rashes, Mia had tearfully confessed to Carly that those theories didn’t really work in the real world. Unfortunately, it was hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
“What do you mean, something awful has happened?” Carly asked loudly, so that Mia could hear her over the shouting. “Did you go to her house?” She rifled through her bag looking for a pen.
“No, but I’ve called her twice and she hasn’t responded, and she had a date last night, and you know how she’s going out with anyone who slides into her DMs.”
Carly stopped looking through her bag because she could not reconcile the phrase sliding into her DMs with her fifty-eight-year-old mother. Second,