Erin was hot. Pretending otherwise would make Laura seem petty. Even more so because Max was secretly lusting after her. Well, as secretly as Max could manage. Laura was her wife–of course she had noticed the lingering glances and the guilt left in the wake of desire. After five blissful years of marriage it finally happened to them: the thing her mother had warned her about, the thing her friends spoke of so casually when their own relationships went through it. Max found another woman attractive enough to feel guilty about it.

Nora suspected with growing horror that she was finally going insane. After thirty years of relative normalcy, of white-knuckling it through every such impulse, of putting the front of composed, dignified femininity, she was at last, like her mom had long predicted, letting the crazy take over. Only once in her early twenties had she lost the grip on her carefully maintained self-possession. And her girlfriend back then was not exactly charmed by what she saw.