birds of a feather

Manon, it’s half past nine, Sophia texts her finally, after thirty minutes of moderate pacing on the balcony of her condo. They live six blocks apart and it is not, like, some huge hassle to get here. All Manon has to do is scoop Yoonchae up out of bed and get her shoes on, and Manon lets Yoonchae dress herself and does not devote time to making sure her pink hair clips match her glittery sneakers, which Sophia would do. If Manon were remotely on time, they would be here already, but instead Yoonchae’s breakfast is getting cold on the kitchen counter.

Manon doesn’t reply, which is par for the course, so Sophia goes back inside and grits her teeth while she pours a half-glass of vanilla soy milk and cuts up a banana and reheats Yoonchae’s oatmeal. This is all fine; it’s just that Yoonchae is Sophia’s one and only daughter. Sophia gets to spend forty-eight precious hours with her every week, and now she has missed out on half of one of those hours because Manon—Sophia’s one and only ex-wife—never checks her fucking phone.

The intercom buzzes right then, and she rushes to let them in. A minute later, Yoonchae is jumping carefully out of the elevator, feet held together.

“Hi, Mommy,” she says. “I’m a mermaid.” Her tail, Sophia guesses. She makes her way to Sophia’s door like that, one hop at a time, laboriously.

When Sophia gathers her up, Yoonchae puts her arms around her neck, but keeps her legs stiff and straight. It makes her really hard to hold. Manon is following behind her, Yoonchae’s backpack slung over her shoulder. Sophia glances at her—the whole way?

“Yes,” Manon says wearily. “And she would not let me carry her.”

“Ariel was still a mermaid when she had legs,” Sophia says. Parenting, in her experience, is mostly improv. “And then she could come inside and have breakfast, and she didn’t have to live in the sea and eat, like, gross barnacles.” Yoonchae considers this, then unsticks her legs slowly. “Thank you, bunny.”

She presses a kiss into Yoonchae’s hair, then lets her down. Yoonchae charges off towards the kitchen. They hear her pulling herself up onto the stool, huffing and puffing a little, and then her pink plastic spoon rattling against the bowl.

“God,” Manon says to no one in particular. She lets Yoonchae’s backpack slip from her shoulder. Her voice is still a little rough from sleep. Her face is bare and she might be going to the gym after this. She has a hoodie tied around her waist and her abs look good, which is not interesting or new.

Sophia takes the backpack from her. It feels too light, but she doesn’t mention it. She asks, “Did you see what I sent you about Tuesdays?”

A crease forms between Manon’s brows, which doesn’t surprise her.

“I don’t get why she needs voice lessons, Sophia,” she says. “She’s four.”

“I started when I was four.”

“And now you’re a pop star.”

Ouch. Sophia takes a deep breath and does not rise to the bait, and does not get testy with her. Specifically, she does not mention that there was a time when one of them needed to make some real money, mostly because her sense is that Manon is doing pretty well for herself right now. She does not bring up how she has the job she has now because of her vocal performance major, or how they met and Yoonchae is here because of that vocal performance major—or how she already gave in the last time they had this conversation, and agreed on no ballet for Yoonchae until kindergarten, and no piano ever unless Yoonchae for some reason wants it desperately.

Manon’s piano teacher was a million years old. His house smelled like mothballs, and now she is, like, traumatized or something.

Sophia relents. “Look,” she says, “it’s not a real lesson. It’s just Lara.” She sends Lara videos all the time of Yoonchae singing in the car. Lara thinks Yoonchae is a once-in-a-generation talent, but Lara has this rule where she will not talk to anyone under the age of sixteen who is not Yoonchae, so who knows, really. The point is, it was Lara’s idea, not Sophia’s. “Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s on Sundays now.”

Manon studies her, brow still a little furrowed. “All right,” she says finally.

She comes inside just for a moment to kiss Yoonchae goodbye, and then Sophia sees her out and closes the door firmly behind her. On Monday, she will drop Yoonchae off at preschool and Manon will pick her up, and they will keep on doing this on Fridays and Mondays until Yoonchae gets her own driver’s license or turns eighteen and goes off to college, probably.

Because they are mature and reasonable and handling this well, and it’s been almost three years now and they’re back to texting each other. For the first few months, Sophia would hand Yoonchae off with notes tucked into her blanket—MAKE SURE TO BE REALLY GENTLE WHEN YOU WASH HER HAIR. And she would get her back with notes that said, I KNOW, SOPHIA, or, BITE ME, and the most credit she could give Manon was that she kept it PG.

Sophia takes Yoonchae to the park that afternoon, and then they come home and Yoonchae helps her make pancit and they video call Sophia’s mom so that they can show her. On Sunday, she takes Yoonchae to storytime at the library. She tries to fit a lot into the these weekends. They go to a café after, one where Sophia can get a matcha latte and Yoonchae can get a tiny hot chocolate in an espresso cup, and Sophia can take one million pictures of her acting grown-up, sipping at it slowly.

That night, she packs her a bento box. In the morning, she puts Yoonchae’s hair into really cute pigtails. She adds elastics with pink flower-shaped plastic bobbles, knowing she might not get them back, and they might end up living on Manon’s bathroom counter.

Yoonchae is going through a big Ariana Grande phase, which Sophia thinks is fine, as long as they stick to radio edits. They get through half of My Everything in the car on the way to school.

She walks Yoonchae inside. “Bye, Mommy,” Yoonchae says, hugging her, and skips off to play blocks. She never seems that torn up over not seeing Sophia for five days, but Sophia guesses it’s what she knows, and she wouldn’t know what to do if it upset Yoonchae, anyway.

HYBE caters lunch for the C-suite on Mondays and Thursdays. The leftovers go to legal, which means Sophia is pretty much guaranteed to see Lara. She isn’t usually, because music production is way down in the sub-basement. Windowless walls are easier to sound-proof, apparently.

Lara’s theory is that Isaac is trying to turn them all into mole people. Actually, if Sophia is being honest, Lara spends a lot of time up on the sixth floor. Right now, Lara is sprawled out on the tan leather couch in Sophia’s airy office, telling her a long story about something that happened at the club last weekend and picking at the remains of a vegan Mediterranean grain bowl.

Some woman rocked up and started hitting on Dani, right in front of her. Sophia is barely listening, distracted by her phone. No matter what she does, she cannot get her mom to stop interacting with Manon’s Instagram, or even just to limit herself to the photos of Yoonchae. Manon’s latest post is from the Broad, a bunch of artsy cropped snaps of Basquiats. Sophia’s mom has commented, Wow! But I want to see your gorgeous face!!, which is so embarrassing.

Manon’s reply is just a heart. Sophia can’t decide how she feels about that.

“I know you aren’t listening to me.” Lara cranes her neck, and Sophia doesn’t turn off her phone in time. “Oh.” She takes a huge bite of chickpeas, then says, garbled, “She went out with one of Dani’s friends, by the way.”

“What?”

Lara swallows. She says, enunciating, “She went out with one of Dani’s friends on Saturday.”

“Who?”

“Manon.” Lara squints at Sophia. “Oh. I don’t know her that well. She makes music videos or something; that’s how Dani met her.”

Sophia sets her phone down on her desk measuredly, and digests that. When? she holds herself back from asking. Where? On Saturday, Lara said, and Sophia thinks she knows where, actually. The reason she knows is…complicated. She guesses she knows how.

Almost three years, and there shouldn’t be anything surprising about it. Manon can do what she wants. Manon is a free woman in a free country, et cetera. Manon probably gets asked out all the time, hit on all the time, and this is probably not even the first time, just the first time that the news has made its way back to Sophia.

Lara says, “I knew you would care.”

“I don’t care.”

“God, this is college all over again. This is junior year.” Lara tips her head back, and she’s creasing the smooth leather of the couch, which is really just meant for straight-backed sitting and attentive listening while Sophia reads contracts out loud. To the ceiling, she says, “You didn’t care about anything Manon did back then, either.”

“You didn’t like her junior year. None of us liked her junior year.” Junior year was its own mess, and Sophia doesn’t think that bringing it up is fair. When Manon transferred in, there was this rumor that she hadn’t even had to audition. It was a big thing. The music program was not that big. They all knew everything about each other.

Sometimes Sophia wants to slap or shake her twenty-year-old self, for a lot of reasons. Every single thing felt like it mattered so much back then. And now none of them are famous. Manon is probably the closest, and she doesn’t even sing anymore.

“I didn’t like her ego,” Lara says. “I didn’t lose my mind because I wanted to fuck her.”

“You literally tried to, like, four times.”

“I know,” Lara says, with no shame whatsoever. She sighs. “I miss her septum piercing.”

Sophia pushes aside the pile of documents that she has not been reviewing this whole time, and plants her elbows on her desk. She says, “Okay, you don’t get to talk like that about my ex.” It’s not like Lara is going to try anything now; Sophia knows that, and Manon wouldn’t bite, anyway, but it’s the principle.

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Lara straightens up, hand over her heart. “I’m actually offended, babe. I would never break the code.”

If this is how Sophia is going to spend her lunch hour, she might as well eat something, so she reaches down under her desk and opens the minifridge. She has the last of the pancit and a piña colada smoothie in there. She always misses the catered leftovers unless Lara brings her something. She’s not very good about not working through what’s supposed to be her break, but it’s whatever.

From how Lara is poking at it, the grain bowl is not that great, anyway.

“I still say you should hook up with her one last time,” Lara says. “For closure.”

“We had a kid together. We don’t get to have closure.” Sophia has had this conversation with her before. She is going to see Manon once a week for the next fourteen years, and even after that, there will be Christmases, and Yoonchae will graduate from college. Something occurs to her for the first time then that makes her shudder: her mom might want her to bring Manon when she finally takes Yoonchae to Manila.

Lara says, “I know, but you get mad at me when I say you guys should just get back together.”

There are so many reasons why that would be a bad idea that Sophia wouldn’t know where to start if she tried to list them all. Instead of replying, she chews for way longer than necessary. These documents on her desk are interesting, actually.

“Dani and I miss when the four of us could hang out together.” Lara lets a beat pass. “I mean, not that I’m not happy you got me in the divorce, but—”

“Lara, I don’t care if you hang out with Manon.” Sophia gathers up her Tupperware. It’s not lost on her that she’s being driven out of her own office, but she doesn’t care. “I don’t have to live like this. I’m going to go eat with Nayoung.” She pauses, because she does want Lara to keep coming up here. “Fuck that girl who hit on Dani.”

Lara doesn’t try to stop her. She says, “I told you, we’re trying.” She sees Sophia’s expression. “Wow, you were really not paying attention to that story.”

“I thought you were upset.” Ten years in, Sophia still doesn’t fully understand Lara and Dani’s situation. Her sense is that they are allowed to date other people, and then they ditch those people at the club so they can go home together.

“That she didn’t hit on me.” Lara slides her half-empty bowl across the glass coffee table, where Sophia will find it later. “I had come straight from work, though, so I was dressed so fug, and Dani looked hot.” She reaches for her phone. “Wait, let me show you the pictures.”

So Manon went on a date. Sophia thinks about that, lying in bed that night. Or—she doesn’t think about it. She just kind of holds the image in her head for a while.

Manon with some woman Dani knows, at a wine bar in Silver Lake. Sophia Googled the address on Saturday night, when she first saw that Manon was there. She scrolled through the pictures. It looked cozy, with dim tracked lights and sleek dark wood paneling, and Manon would not have gone to a wine bar on her own, so she sort of knew.

She knew where Manon was because they still have location sharing turned on, okay? And sometimes she just wants to see where Manon is. It’s not a big deal.

Sophia used to take her phone out sometimes when she was pulling all-nighters in the law library, and then working late during that whole awful first year at the firm, She would watch the little blinking blue dot on the screen, Manon’s blue dot, the dot that meant that Manon had made it home, and was waiting for her. Maybe Sophia wouldn’t be back until the early hours of the morning, but the apartment would smell good, like incense and Japanese take-out. And she could take the world’s fastest shower and collapse down into a warm bed, and Manon would yawn and roll over and bury her face in her hair.

Now she checks because Manon has her daughter five nights a week. And sometimes on Saturday nights, for no reason at all.

At least it was somewhere she’s never been, Sophia thinks. Not one of their places, not that she and Manon have places anymore.

The thing is, Sophia gets hit on. It doesn’t happen that often—Lara says she spends too much time at the office—but Leo from the C-suite has asked to take her out to dinner, like, four times now. Sophia keeps making up polite excuses to decline, because she has work and Yoonchae to think about.

But that’s just her.

Okay, fine. The whole long story. Senior year, Sophia worked out that maybe she did not hate Manon, or Manon’s perfect long-lashed doll eyes, and it was also possible that Manon did not hate her. And while they had been very bad at being cordial with each other, they turned out to be extremely good at having sex with each other, and then Dani started threatening to move out and throwing her shoes at Manon’s locked bedroom door.

Manon sold her first painting and dropped out the next week, which Sophia didn’t approve of, but also couldn’t really blame her for. As for Sophia, she graduated, took stock of herself, and realized that she was not and was probably not ever going to be a famous singer. She had kind of known that already. Famous singers didn’t move to LA for college; they just moved to LA.

So she applied to law school, figuring she could probably be good at that also. “What is law, if not professional yapping?” asked Lara. At the time, she was pretty faded, which was why she was getting existential, but that had basically been Sophia’s thought process, too.

They stayed in L.A.; they all switched places. Sophia moved in with Manon. Dani moved in with Lara. They continued to have sex, and to go to Manon’s friends’ weird underground pop-up clubs, and to host cobbled-together dinner parties to which Manon did not contribute a lot, honestly.

Setting aside six hellish exam periods, those were good years. Manon had three paintings in open shows, then her first solo exhibition at the Kohn. Sophia spent her big-law summer stipend on a Cartier Tank Américaine. They were young and in love and kind of rich, suddenly, as long as they ignored Sophia’s student loans.

Then they were twenty-six, and it had been five years. Once Sophia passed the bar, her mom started sending her listicles about wedding venues on Luzon. “I would marry you,” Manon said, and kissed Sophia on the corner of her mouth, which was not exactly a fairytale proposal, or even a proposal at all.

It caught Sophia off guard anyway. They hadn’t even been talking about it. Manon had been sitting on the edge of the bathtub, watching her brush her hair.

Back then, that was how they talked about everything: I would. We could. They could get married. They could say, Fuck it, and sell all their furniture, and move to Manila or Lucerne. That was Manon’s idea—Sophia had the J.D. Okay, they could move to New York, but it got really cold there. They could buy a house in L.A. someday, one big enough for Manon to have a real studio, instead of just covering the living room floor in drop cloth and shoving all the furniture up against the walls.

They could honeymoon somewhere tropical. They could have a kid, or get a kid from somewhere. That was the other thing Sophia’s mom had started angling for.

It all seemed really distant. It was basically a thought experiment. In Sophia’s head, a baby was something that you could buy adorable little shoes for. She had had first and middle names picked out since junior high, and Manon did not like a single one of them. They bickered about it sometimes before they fell asleep, drowsily.

Sophia put out some very light feelers, only because she had heard that it was something you had to do years and years in advance. Five or six years, she was told, minimum. There was a long waitlist. That was kind of perfect; It gave them time to decide whether they even wanted to.

“It’s not a contract,” she told Manon. “We just put our names down.” Manon worked her bottom lip between her teeth for a while.

“Okay,” she said at last. “If you think we should. I mean, if you really want to.”

Then, four months later—Sophia is honestly still not super clear on the details—some other couple’s plans must have fallen through. Because they got a frantic phone call from the agency, and there was Yoonchae.

It wasn’t a contract. It was still a choice right up until they saw her for the first time, sleepy baby Yoonchae blinking at them in a pale pink onesie. She reached up and got a fistful of Manon’s dangling braids, and Sophia said, “We have to, right?” They had nothing, no crib, no car seat, but her curled fingers were so unbelievably tiny.

So they had what Lara called the World’s First Cis Lesbian Shotgun Wedding, and that was fun, actually, even though Sophia’s mom has never forgiven her. Not for marrying Manon, but for not letting her plan it, and not inviting her, and not doing it in Manila.

Then they sat down, or Sophia did, and figured out how they were actually going to do it. “Oh my god, we have to keep her alive,” Manon said, wide-eyed. It was sinking in. “We have to teach her everything about everything, Sophia. She literally just got here.”

But Sophia could take leave. She could give up on ever making partner, and go in-house at HYBE and put her foot down and block off her weekends. Sometimes life changed in an instant and that was the only thing you could really do: rewrite your ten-year plan and buckle down and make it work.

Or you could make it six months and then freak out about life moving too fast, have a crying breakdown, and disappear for three entire days, leaving your wife completely alone with a baby. Then you could turn up on her doorstep at three in the morning and try to say you were sorry, but end up explaining that you had realized you needed space, which meant a whole entire separate loft to do your stupid art in.

You could do that, too.

Whatever.

Manon said once, “I tell you I’m sorry over and over again, and it doesn’t matter.” It was late. Yoonchae was sleeping, and she was keeping her voice low. The kitchen island was between them, and her hands were curled tight around the edge of the counter. Everything they said to each other back then basically crackled. “So why am I even doing this, Sophia? Why am I still trying to apologize to you?”

“There are some things you don’t get to be sorry for. You just don’t get to do them.”

“Okay,” Manon said, “but I don’t have a fucking time machine, so.”

And, yes, Manon has stepped it up since then. Sophia can see that. Manon has Yoonchae all week, and has never complained. Manon still doesn’t cook, but she makes peanut butter sandwiches on whole wheat for Yoonchae’s school lunches, and as far as Sophia knows, she sticks to their half-hour-of-screen-time deal.

Her main complaints are the clothes, and the lateness, and the way that a couple of times, Manon has taken Yoonchae to galas that did not end until midnight. On school nights, too. Manon is really against any kind of tutoring, which is fine now, but what about when Yoonchae reaches, like, middle school? Also, she doesn’t like that Manon has a loft; she thinks it’s selfish of her.

Yoonchae has a bedroom and a bed at Sophia’s: low to the ground, white wrought-iron frame, pink sheets, gauzy pink canopy. At Manon’s, she has a futon mattress and a sleeping bag, and every night, Manon just lets her set up camp wherever. Sophia can’t get on board with this, even though she knows Yoonchae loves it. On the weekends, Yoonchae is always begging Sophia to let her sleep in the bathtub or on the kitchen floor.

Manon lingers in the hallway for a little longer than usual the next Saturday, watching Sophia help Yoonchae un-Velcro her sneakers. “I need to ask you something,” she says, then does a vague expressive thing with her hands. Not in front of her.

“Okay, go eat,” Sophia says, patting Yoonchae’s back. “I’ll be there in a second.” She takes a moment to straighten Yoonchae’s shoes on the rack. They’re kind of shedding glitter all over the hardwood. Shit. She can see it collecting in the seams between the boards.

But she follows Manon down the hallway, toward the elevator. Just like always, she sees Manon cut her eyes at the ugly painted still life hanging on the wall. It’s, like, some type of fruit. Sophia’s lived here for years, and she still doesn’t really know.

“I have to meet with this broker.” Manon says. She seems hesitant, tugging her bag higher on her shoulder. “I was wondering if you could take Yoonchae next Tuesday.”

Sophia blinks. Unless one of them is sick, they don’t break from the schedule. “Probably not,” she says, which is just the truth, but then she thinks about what she actually has on her calendar: only a morning meeting with the Geffen attorneys. “Wait, maybe. I can see.”

Dani or Lara could pick Yoonchae up, maybe, and watch her for a few hours. Sophia would need to get the car seat to them, somehow. She does not love this idea, because the one time she let Lara babysit three months ago, Yoonchae came home with two full sleeves of temporary tattoos. Which—okay, yes—was ultimately harmless, but until they washed off, it looked like Sophia had let her daughter join a Pinkie Pie-themed prison gang.

“It’s fine,” Manon says. “I’ll get him to move it if you can’t.” She yawns, covering her mouth. “I don’t really want to go all the way out there, anyway.”

Out there, Sophia thinks. Silver Lake? She pushes it out of her head. She doesn’t know if Manon would lie to her.

She could work late on Monday, maybe, and talk to Nayoung. She says, “I might be able to.”

“All right,” Manon says, starting to reach for the elevator button. Her nails are short right now, Sophia notices, nude and glossy. “Just text me.”

Before Sophia can stop herself, she feels her mouth opening. “I was actually going to ask if—” she hears herself say, one rushed tangle of words, and Manon turns back to her. Then it’s too late, and she has to go through with it. Breathe, she thinks. “If she could spend one Saturday night with you.”

Manon looks at her, head tilted. All she asks is, “When?”

“I don’t know yet. He’s busy, too.” Sophia’s fidgeting with the hem of her top. She can only kind of read the angle of Manon’s eyebrows, “We’re both really busy, so.”

“It’s a guy?”

Sophia frowns. “You’re my exception,” she says. “I always told you that.”

Manon hums noncommittally, but she has to remember.

“His name is Leo. He’s in the C-suite,” Sophia says, completely unnecessarily.

“Okay.” Manon reaches again for the button. “I could, probably.” By the time she presses it and it lights up, her face is completely neutral.

It’s not, like—nothing shows on Manon’s face before that. But Sophia has to keep herself from bringing her hand to her mouth, from biting at her cuticle. The elevator chimes and the doors slide open. Manon steps inside, gives her a little wave. Sophia just can’t shake the feeling that Manon wants to say something about this, or wants to laugh at her.

Now Sophia actually has to go out with Leo from the C-suite. Which shouldn’t feel like some huge burden. He’s soft-spoken and handsome in a square-jawed K-drama-lead way. He’s really tall.

The hard part turns out to be finding a time when they are both free. Now is not a good time, not when this Geffen thing is coming together. It would be simpler if he wasn’t so set on taking her out to dinner—there’s this convenience store in Little Tokyo that’s open twenty-four hours and has gashapon, but Leo maybe thinks of Sophia as, like, a woman in her thirties, a serious adult lawyer,

(One of the best things about Yoonchae: she gets upset when things are not fair. Yoonchae tugging on Sophia’s sleeve at the conbini, telling Sophia earnestly, Now you choose one, Mommy. Twist my arm, Sophia thought, feeding quarters into the Calico Critter keychain machine. She got a baby rabbit in a princess dress. It dangles from her car keys now.)

She couldn’t take him there, anyway. Manon didn’t take Dani’s friend there.

Rain check on the date, she and Leo decide, and they’ll try to do something a month from now. He has very straight white teeth, Sophia notices, and can maybe cook, because he’s brought his own lunch. Then she makes herself stop listing reasons to go through with this in her head. She feels like she’s trying too hard to convince herself of something.

When she tells Lara, all Lara says is, “They say you shouldn’t date yourself.” They’re in Sophia’s living room. Lara is on her phone, lying on her back on the rug.

What does that mean? Sophia’s not, like, a suit. She has a real job. She should definitely not say that to Leo, she thinks, or out loud right now. It’s true that they work together, but she and Lara work together, technically. Back when Dani used to choreograph for HYBE, it could feel really incestuous. Sophia is kind of glad Dani freelances now.

“Who says that?”

Lara shrugs. “A lot of people.”

Sophia toys with her Pandora bracelet. She says, “I like myself, though.” She hasn’t really thought about it beyond this one date. She hasn’t considered the possibility that this might actually go somewhere.

“Mm, I know.”

Lara spends the next minute tapping out a long text to someone. and Sophia listens to Yoonchae clattering around in the kitchen. If she stays silent for too long, then Sophia will go and check on her, but she can hear Yoonchae talking to herself, gently knocking her Barbies’ heads together.

These vocal lessons have not exactly gone how Sophia imagined they would. Lara turns up at her place at noon and spends an hour trying to teach Yoonchae Beyoncé songs. Then she collapses onto Sophia’s couch and they end up gossiping for three hours while Yoonchae connects Lara’s tattoos with magic marker, or they all do karaoke.

Sophia might be getting a headache. Sometimes she wishes Manon had gotten Lara. She doesn’t think Dani actually cares whether she and Manon get back together.

Okay, she doesn’t wish that. Lara was her randomly assigned freshman-year roommate. She’s cleaned Lara’s puke off her shoes and done one hundred karaoke duets with her and, like, showered with her. When Yoonchae arrived, Lara made it very clear that she would be interested in her once she could talk, and had, “like, a personality,” and was not going to spit up on her. And then she stayed with Sophia for two nights while Manon had her freakout, and got up in the night when Yoonchae cried, and made up lullabies for her.

If Sophia told her to seriously, Lara would probably drop it forever. She just hasn’t, for some reason. Because it so obviously won’t happen, maybe.

Lara is still squinting at her phone. Sophia asks, “Who’s texting you?”

“Gabi.” Sophia doesn’t know that name, but Lara seems like she recognizes that, “Do you remember when I told you—”

“Wait, the woman from the club?”

“We worked it out on the remix,” Lara says, and Sophia guesses that means they went back and Lara was dressed up, and maybe she and Dani explained that they came as a package deal. She doesn’t ask because she doesn’t really want the details—not with Yoonchae in earshot, or ever.

She’s going to get them later. She searches for a safer question. “What does she do?”

“Pole dance.” Lara glances up at her, then starts to laugh. “And aerial silks, but you’re cute when you’re trying not to be judgmental.”

Sophia starts to protest, then swallows it, even though she’s not being judgmental. She used to go with Manon to all her art friends’ weird parties, where people were always like, wriggling around naked on the floor. Covered in glow-in-the-dark paint, and it would turn out that that was a metaphor for war, or something. And maybe she was thankful that Manon’s art didn’t involve taking off her clothes.

Most of the time. Manon said once, unclasping Sophia’s bra in the dark stairwell of a warehouse space in Koreatown, “This actually symbolizes how you look so hot right now, and I want to fuck you.”

Sophia closes her eyes, counts to three, then opens them again. Lara has set her phone aside, and is looking at her.

“Does he know you’re still married?”

“You know that’s only so she can stay on my insurance.” That’s not an answer, but Lara’s not asking because she really wants to know, anyway.

“Babe,” Lara says, switching to a British accent for some reason. She pats Sophia’s knee. “That’s the great American love story.”

Manon has a show at New Image. She mentions this to Dani, which means Sophia finds out a day later from Lara. That feels kind of weird, but there’s no real reason for Manon to tell her.

Sophia hasn’t been to New Image in years, but she remembers it. It’s this hollowed-out chunk of blue stucco building on Santa Monica. It looks like nothing on the outside, sandwiched between a store that sells electric vacuums and a tattoo parlor.

Bodies / Water is the name of the series, of maybe left out, replaced with that slash for some Art reason Sophia probably still wouldn’t get if Manon explained it to her. It could be a bunch of paintings of the Pacific, but Sophia knows Manon’s m.o. and expects it to be basically a lot of bare-chested women caressing other. Manon is very into the idea of free love, in theory. It’s weird; when she and Sophia were together, she used to like belonging to her.

Sophia checks Manon’s socials in case she’s posted, like, a sneak peek, but she can’t find one. So she goes on a Saturday afternoon and brings Yoonchae, because she doesn’t want to go alone and she really doesn’t want to go with Lara. If it turns out to be, like, a mermaid orgy, she can clap her hands over Yoonchae’s eyes and carry her out of there.

“Have you seen Mama’s new paintings?” she asks Yoonchae in the car, glancing up to gauge her reaction in the rear-view mirror. Yes, is the answer, so they must not be that graphic, but the only thing Sophia can get out of her is that the paintings are big and blue.

It turns out that Yoonchae has been to New Image before, even. The guy who lets them in knows her, even though Yoonchae gets shy and hides behind Sophia’s legs when he tries to talk to her.

Inside, the gallery is pretty much how Sophia remembers it: polished concrete floors, tracked lighting, white-walled and industrial. They walk through two rooms; Yoonchae wants to spend a long time looking at a sculpture of a three-legged dog. She holds her hands carefully behind her back. They’ve talked a lot about what you do and don’t do when art is on display.

Here it is—Meret Manon on the sign. Bodies / Water. Before they even go in, Sophia sees that the light in this room is softer.

Manon must have asked for that, she thinks. Manon hates white fluorescents. Once she watched Manon finish setting up a full exhibition, then look it over, curse, and drag the stretched canvases outside and into the grass.

Yoonchae hops over the threshold. “That’s Mama,” she says, pointing, like Sophia could miss it.

“You were right, bunny,” Sophia says, a little blankly. “Big and blue.”

She didn’t know that Manon ever painted self-portraits—just women with her eyes or hair, women who vaguely looked like her. But now she is staring at nine enormous paintings of Manon. Everywhere she turns, Manon’s heavy-lidded eyes are not quite looking back at her.

Bodies. Manon’s body. Also, there is water. Like, everywhere, all over the place, saltwater churning around Manon’s waist, dark water soaking into her jeans and rippling blue underwater light. Glossy orange koi are winding themselves between her braids and her spread fingers. Manon is arching her back and water is running in rivulets down her bare stomach, spilling from her mouth, and Sophia has to usher Yoonchae kind of quickly past that one.

They have dates instead of names. None of the plaques really say anything. Just: acrylic, oil, spray paint on wooden board, which Sophia knew already.

They’ve made it to the last painting. The last Manon is lying on her back in shallow water, framed from the waist up. Every part of her except for her face is submerged. The sun might be setting; everything is tinted pink with stippled grapefruit-colored light.

Manon is holding a strange, crumpled bundle to her chest, and Sophia peers at it. Something wrapped around something else; it looks like cellophane or pink kelp. Manon’s hands are empty in every other painting. She’s holding it or her hands are on it, lifting it up above the water.

Wait, Sophia thinks. It hits her all at once. I know this picture.

She took this picture. The date on the plaque is the day she took this picture. This picture is probably still on her phone, somewhere in the depths of her camera roll. Manon was lying across the bed in that black tank top, with Yoonchae sleeping on her chest. Sophia leaned over her. That shadow falling over Manon’s stomach belongs to her.

Yoonchae was so little back then that Manon could cover her whole back with her hands. “Look,” Sophia says, and lifts Yoonchae up onto her right hip. She brings her level with the faded pink bundle in Manon’s arms. “That’s you.”

Yoonchae squints. “Nuh-uh.” She’s the same way when Sophia shows her her baby pictures. In her head, everything has always been the exact way it is now.

“No, it is, though.” Sophia can barely believe someone could actually buy this, that it could hang in some rich person’s living room on the other side of the country. She took that picture standing beside their bed, the bed she still has. She fell asleep with Manon’s hand curled around her hip that night. “A long time ago.”

Not that long. Three years.

Fuck, it feels like a really long time ago.

She lets Yoonchae down slowly. Now she wants to go back and check the dates on every plaque. She wants to stand here and scroll back three years in her camera roll. But Yoonchae is already heading for the next and last room, and she has to follow her. It’s watercolors or something. Sophia doesn’t really see them at all.

Yoonchae was five months old then, and it didn’t feel like drowning, not yet. Or it never felt like drowning. Sophia doesn’t remember it that way.

Sophia can’t find the photo, later, and she thinks she might have reached for Manon’s phone. Back then, they both had the same passcode: Yoonchae’s birthday. Sophia hasn’t changed hers. She wonders what Manon’s is now.

She takes a handful of flyers from New Image, thinking someone down in Creative might be interested. It hits her too late, though, that Lara would see. So they just live on her coffee table until she recycles them, because they can’t still be there in a week when Manon comes to drop off Yoonchae.

Manon’s show gets a two-sentence mention in the Times, and then a longer, gushier review in this contemporary art magazine that Sophia knows for a fact she is not subscribed to. For three years, it’s been showing up in the mailbox downstairs. Sometimes she gets Manon’s packages; she thinks it’s, like, autofill.

She rolls the issue up, tucks it into Yoonchae’s backpack, and texts Manon another reminder to update her address. She knows Manon sees it, but she doesn’t get a reply.

For four days, Manon is down with the flu, so Yoonchae stays with Sophia. On Wednesday and Thursday, she has to go to after-school care. She likes it, luckily; she uses that time to make a lot of messy paintings on paper plates. They’re still wet when Sophia picks her up. Her carseat gets stained blue and purple.

Early on Thursday morning, Sophia swings by Manon’s and drops off a Tupperware of arroz caldo, made her mom’s way, really sinus-clearing, with a lot of ginger. She’s done this four or five times since she and Manon broke up—the other times because Yoonchae had a cold, but whatever.

“Thank you,” Manon says groggily, taking the container from her. She kind of looks like shit, to the extent that Manon ever looks like shit, which means she looks a little tired and is wearing a ratty plaid bathrobe.

It’s not a big deal. It’s literally just soup. Sophia doesn’t feel like she needs to tell anyone about it, and especially not Lara.

For some reason, Yoonchae has a half-day on Friday, so Sophia picks her up on her lunch break and brings her to work with her. She can get away with that as long as it doesn’t happen more than once or twice a year, and no one tells Mitra. Yoonchae lies on her stomach under the glass coffee table and drafts her own contracts, long wavy lines of black crayon on printer paper.

Lara comes up from the sub-basement with a set of sparkly gel pens and mango candy, even though she had literally no way of knowing that Yoonchae would be here. She flips through the contracts and signs them all with dramatic flourishes. “Now you have to do what I say for one million years,” Yoonchae tells her, and takes off running and laps Sophia’s desk, giggling maniacally.

“You know what?” Lara says, squinting down at the scribbles. She shakes her head. “I did not read the fine print. That’s on me.”

Sophia lets her take Yoonchae down to music production—to show her off, she knows, even though Lara says she wants to show her the studio. The one and only Yoonchae Laforteza-Bannerman—okay, Sophia knows that it is kind of a mouthful. She might need a stage name. Still: rising pop star, future worldwide sensation. In fourteen years—

“Eighteen!” Sophia hollers. She’s listening as Lara workshops this speech in the hallway. “She has to go to college!”

In eighteen years, Yoonchae will be at the top of the charts, so watch out.

Sophia and Leo set a time, finally. It is a Saturday night. He wants to take her to Nobu, which Lara says is kind of so fifteen years ago. Sophia wonders what Manon would think, then wonders why she cares, then wonders whether there is a polite, not-insane-sounding way of saying, My ex-wife and I still have location sharing on, so I need you to take me somewhere cool.

No, there is not. Also, she still doesn’t know if Manon knows about that. So she texts him that that sounds good, and they’ll go to Nobu. She thinks she might be using too many exclamation points, but he’s the one who asked her out four times, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

“You have to text me what you’re going to wear, though,” Lara tells her.

“I obviously will.” Sophia still does that before important meetings, even though Lara’s advice is sometimes, like, ditch the button-up, babe; you should definitely just wear the blazer.

“That’s fine,” Manon says, shrugging, when Sophia checks with her. She’s gotten over the flu, but has not returned Sophia’s Tupperware. “Yoonchae and I will watch a movie or something. I’ll make popcorn.”

“Okay, but, like, Disney,” Sophia says. “Nothing overstimulating.”

Manon laughs out loud. “Overstimulating,” she says, in what is probably supposed to be an impression of her.

The night of, though, Lara takes a really long time to respond to Sophia’s texts. Then she video calls Sophia from a club in WeHo, so Sophia gets to listen to Dani screaming along to a Carti song. Then she gets to watch Dani make out sloppily with a dark-haired woman who has taken Lara’s advice to ditch the button-up, and who is also, when the strobing light plays across her face for a moment, maybe fifteen years older than her.

They keep trying to pull Lara in. “Give me a second,” Lara keeps saying, but then she cranes her neck so that the cougar can shove her tongue down her throat. She gives Sophia a blind thumbs-up. KNOW A BAD BITCH WHEN I SEE ONE is thundering from the speakers. Dani is, like, grinding on her.

Ew. Whatever. “Hi, Dani!” Sophia calls, and waves. “I miss you!” Then she sets her phone face-down until Lara can talk again. Lara’s right, though, she thinks. She should go with the black, not the white. She has to wrestle for a while with the zipper.

She hasn’t needed a first-date fit in a long time. She keeps thinking about that, looking herself over in the mirror. She hasn’t been on a first date since—god, the summer after junior year. Also, she didn’t know that that was going to be a date, and she has zero memory of what she wore.

She knows what Manon was wearing. Manon had a lot of film major friends. There was this showcase the week after finals, and Sophia went with her. Lara had already left, and Dani would have burst out laughing during the, like, big emotional moments.

“You can’t let me do that,” Manon said, which was why Sophia thought she had asked her.

They had been tolerating each other. They were in group chats together. They hung out, but always with Dani and Lara. Sometimes Manon texted Sophia asking for lecture notes, and Sophia replied with eye roll emojis, then sent them to her. They had kissed one time, drunkenly—a lot—in the upstairs bathroom at a house party. Sophia had lost her shirt. It had been a mistake and they hadn’t ever talked about it, after.

So Sophia went with her, and Manon squirmed in her seat and kept her mouth pressed into a tight line, and whenever anything really melodramatic happened, Sophia dug her fingernails hard into the back of Manon’s hand.

Some of the shorts were okay, though. Sophia took Manon’s word for it. On her own time, she still mostly watched, like, Hannah Montana. Some of them were even good, and Manon was watching with real interest, but they were still holding hands. And then she sighed and leaned over and rested her head on Sophia’s shoulder.

Sophia had to wait for her to get up and go to the bathroom. i think manon thinks this is a date!!, she texted Dani and Lara frantically.

duh, Dani replied. Lara sent her a link to a WikiHow article about scissoring, so that was great; both of them were really helpful.

Halfway through dinner, Sophia’s phone starts to chime furiously, and when she checks, it’s, like, twelve gibberish texts from Lara. Strings of random letters, which means she’s typing with one hand, not looking at the screen. DO NOT TEXT ME WHILE YOU’RE HAVING SEX, Sophia sends, and snaps the phone closed.

“Work stuff,” she says apologetically. Of course he’s so understanding.

He really is nice. He talks a little too much about work, but Sophia talks too much about work, work and Yoonchae. She is maybe too used to talking to Lara and Manon, to Yoonchae’s teachers, to people who care about her. But Yoonchae got straight rainbow stickers and smiley faces on her last report card, and Sophia kind of thinks that everyone in the world should know this. She keeps herself on a leash, though.

(“What even is a preschool report card?” Manon asked. “What could it say, your kid failed naptime?” But Sophia knows Manon’s favorite part of high school was graduating, and her favorite part of college was dropping out, so she is not, like, an authority.)

Leo is nice, and his hair and his watch are nice, and the miso black cod is nice, and Sophia keeps realizing that she’s watching her reflection in the dark glass of the window. At the end of the night, she thinks about whether she wants his tongue in her mouth, and the answer is: not really.

So before they leave, she goes to the bathroom and reapplies an aggressive amount of gloss, enough that when they say their goodbyes, he looks at her lips, hesitates, and then kisses her on the cheek. He wants to walk her back to her car. She tells him he doesn’t need to.

It probably won’t happen again, she thinks absently, carefully sidestepping a sidewalk grate so that her heel doesn’t catch. That wasn’t the point, though.

So what was the point, anyway?

A block away, her phone vibrates in her bag. She glances at the screen. Manon.

hey, says the text. i might need you to come over.

Okay. Come over. Not come to—Sophia doesn’t know, the emergency room, the police station, any number of terrible places where Manon and Yoonchae could be. This could be a million different things. For all she knows, Manon is literally just being petty. Deep down, though, she doesn’t really think Manon would do that, and she is fumbling to find Manon’s contact, to press call.

Her stomach is churning, suddenly. It was her night. She was supposed to be with her.

Manon picks up on the second ring. “Hi,” she says, sounding a little weary.

“What happened? What’s wrong?” It all just comes tumbling out of Sophia’s mouth, and she’s distantly aware that she’s giving Manon no chance to answer. She used to have to rein herself in hard during mock trial. “Is she okay? What did you—”

“Okay, Sophia, breathe,” Manon says. “She’s fine.” She hesitates. “Have you seen Bambi? ”

“What?” Sophia is blocking basically the whole sidewalk. A couple has to let go of each other’s hands to pass, and they shoot twin dirty looks at her. She edges closer to the curb. Stretched out across the pavement, her shadow looks strange and spidery.

“Bambi. Do you know what happens to—”

“His mom. Oh my god, Manon, she’ll be scarred.” Now the people passing Sophia are eyeing her warily; she’s gripping the lamppost in a way that’s making them think that something much worse has happened. But Yoonchae got bright-eyed and sniffly last week over that song about the little ducks, even though all she had to do was wait; they all come back to their mama in the end. “Why would you show that to her?”

“It’s Disney. She loves animals.” More quietly, Manon says, “I didn’t know the mom died.” Sophia hears her exhale, long and slow. “She’s calmed down, but I think she would feel better if you—”

“I’m coming.” Sophia started power-walking thirty seconds ago. She’s already put another block behind her. She can see the trunk of her car. “I’m three minutes away.”

Sophia’s palms are sweaty by the time she parks outside Manon’s building. She has to wipe her hands on her dress in the elevator. She barely ever comes here, and every time, she has to wrack her brain for the floor, the apartment number. She’s a little relieved when it’s actually Manon who answers the door.

Manon’s wearing sweatpants; she has a silk scarf tied around her braids. She looks tired, a little apprehensive; she steps aside to let Sophia in. Yoonchae is sitting on Manon’s couch, almost swallowed up by a way-too-big USC sweatshirt. She looks very, very small, and when she sees Sophia, her eyes start to well up again.

Her face crumples, and then Sophia is holding her so tightly, saying, “I know. Shh, I know,” as Yoonchae sniffles the whole plot of Bambi against her shoulder. Well, half of the plot, right up to the chase through the woods, and then Sophia guesses they had to turn off the TV.

“It’s only a movie, bunny.” She’s stroking Yoonchae’s tousled hair. “If you keep watching, he finds his dad.” She almost lies; she almost says, He finds his other mommy, or his two other mommies, only because they haven’t had that talk with her yet. Her sense is that Yoonchae knows from books about dads, and knows that men live in some of her classmates’ houses, but maybe doesn’t understand why. Someday, though, they might watch the rest of this movie, and Yoonchae would get mad at her.

“I know,” Yoonchae says wetly, and buries her face against Sophia’s shoulder. Manon must have looked it up, Sophia thinks. She must have told her.

Sophia kisses the top of her head, then looks up. It’s almost midnight. What is she going to do, leave with her? Take her home? Manon is here, though, watching her from the doorway. Yoonchae’s thumb is in her mouth now; she’s stopped crying. She’s just sniffling softly.

For a moment, Sophia thinks Manon might ask her, How was your date?

“I can lend you pajamas,” Manon says instead, quietly. So maybe Sophia can’t read her thoughts anymore, but she learned the hard way that she could never really read Manon’s mind, anyway.

Sophia changes into her borrowed pajamas in the bathroom. It feels stupid and necessary in equal parts, like a lot of things that she’s done tonight. She puts her hair up, then washes her face, then uses as much of Manon’s expensive moisturizer as she can justify. At some point, she is delaying the inevitable, and also, she should be with her daughter.

But she’s listening to the two of them out in the bedroom. “Okay, you can’t lie like that,” she hears Manon say. “You’re taking up the whole bed,” After one silent second, she snorts, so Yoonchae must starfish herself out even more; there’s a tussle, the slats creaking, and Yoonchae is giggling, even though she still sounds wet and a little snotty.

Sophia goes out into the bedroom, Manon’s bedframe is strange, like a sculpture, the color of sand with rounded edges. Her mattress is just a mattress, though, and Yoonchae is tucked in neatly in the exact middle.

She’s pretending to sleep. Her arms are straight at her sides. She peeks at Sophia with both eyes, not very subtly.

“Our Yoonchae is always so calm and well-behaved,” Sophia tells Manon. Manon takes the hint; she scoffs in mock disbelief, and Yoonchae basically starts to vibrate, she is trying not to laugh so hard.

Manon has taken the right side, when she always used to sleep on the left, when there are two empty glasses and a knotted phone charger on the other nightstand. She’s done it on purpose, Sophia thinks, for whatever reason. She almost lies down on top of the covers.

That’s stupid, though; it’s not like they haven’t all shared a bed before. The best thing to do, she decides, is to be as normal about this as possible. Yoonchae rolls over to blink at her, and then Sophia can look at her. She turns the lamp off, and eases herself down onto the mattress.

Yoonchae wriggles closer to her. “I want a song,” she says, softened by the pillow.

Sophia looks at Manon. Yes? No? Manon just shrugs a little, looking back at her. If you want to, is what Sophia takes away from it, but what she wants doesn’t really matter.

“Okay,” she says slowly. It’s way past Yoonchae’s bedtime, but it won’t take that long.

So she does Part of Your World—not the cleanest performance; she’s lying on her back, and for the sake of Manon’s neighbors, she has to try to keep her voice down. Also, Manon’s gaze on her is making her self-conscious, even though Manon has heard her sing a million times and has even maybe heard her sing this specific song before.

But she gets through the first verse, and then Manon starts to hum along. They haven’t done this in so long, but Manon is good; she can find the harmonies. As they reach the last lines, Sophia sets her hands in the air so that Manon knows she wants to take the high part. Manon probably rolls her eyes; Sophia’s not looking, but she lets her.

They sound better together than Sophia would have thought. She only really sings to Yoonchae, and she doesn’t know if Manon ever sings anymore.

“That’s all,” she says, once she’s let the last note fade away. She pets Yoonchae’s hair. “Try to go to sleep now, bunny.”

Yoonchae blinks at her once, then closes her eyes. She asks, sounding drowsy, “What’s reprimand?”

“When you tell someone not to do something,” Manon says, and tucks the comforter tighter around her.

“Oh. Okay.” Yoonchae yawns hugely. “Like no shoes inside.” Sophia hears Manon stifle a laugh, and ignores her.

”Right, exactly,” she says. Yoonchae is so smart. She could never be with someone who didn’t recognize that, actually.

When Yoonchae’s breathing slows, Sophia rests her fingertips lightly on her back. She used to do this when Yoonchae was a baby, when Yoonchae still slept on Manon’s chest; she would doze off beside them, sometimes, matching her own breaths to that soft rise and fall.

Now she touches the frayed cut-out neck of the sweatshirt. “You should get rid of this.” She’s murmuring so that she doesn’t wake her. “It’s so ratty.”

Manon is lying on her back; she turns her head slowly. She says, keeping her voice just as low, “I thought you might want it back one day.”

Sophia has never been in this apartment at night. Moonlight is spilling in through the skylight above them, staining everything silver-gray. Manon’s dark eyes are stark; her curled hand is stark against the white pillowcase. She’s watching Sophia over the top of Yoonchae’s head, evenly.

Yoonchae snuffles quietly in her sleep. Her eyelashes flutter. They look so long in the dark, casting dusky shadows onto her cheeks.

Sophia says, “She looks like you.”

Manon raises an eyebrow, which Sophia understands. When they’re out together, a lot of people think Manon is Yoonchae’s babysitter.

“No, really,” Sophia says, “I always think that when she’s sleeping.” It’s the truth; they sleep with their mouths a little open, and ball their hands up in the same way. She thinks it when Yoonchae’s brow furrows, too; she looks like Manon when she’s staring at a canvas. “And when she’s concentrating really hard on something, she looks like you.”

Sometimes Sophia forgets that Manon has been here the whole time, that Manon met Yoonchae on the day she met Yoonchae. She could say to Manon, if they said this kind of thing to each other, Isn’t it so crazy? Meaning: every single little thing Yoonchae does, Yoonchae printing her own name for the first time with all the letters facing the right way, and she thinks maybe Manon would understand, and would agree with her.

Manon is silent, when it should be her turn now to tell Sophia when Yoonchae looks like her—even though Sophia knows; Yoonchae has this one nose-scrunch thing she does when something is gross to her. And she is very strategic, trying to negotiate her bedtime. People think all the time that Yoonchae is Sophia’s real daughter.

Real isn’t the right word, because she is. But people think she, like, came out of her.

Sophia feels exhausted, suddenly. Maybe she’s been tired this whole time; maybe her heartbeat is finally slowing down from reading that text. Maybe it’s just that Manon’s mattress is soft, and she is lying so close to Yoonchae, still stroking her back and breathing in the warm, sleepy scent of her hair.

On the edge of sleep, she hears Manon say quietly, “I like your perfume.” Her fingers slip under Sophia’s wrist; she turns it over, rubs her thumb across the base of her palm, and Sophia slips away.

Yoonchae stirs before both of them, which Sophia thinks is kind of ideal, actually. She announces this by rolling over and planting her knee into Manon’s stomach; Manon wheezes, clutching at her ribs, and the sound wakes Sophia.

If there’s a release, if something slips out from between her fingers, she can’t be certain of it. She’s just barely awake; it’s hazy like a dream, without the sharper contours of memory.

Yoonchae wants to wear the halter tankini top from her bathing suit, a rainbow tulle skirt, cargo pants, and jeweled plastic flip-flops. Manon apparently sees no problem with this at all. Sophia sucks on her teeth and says nothing; it’s Manon’s house. Also, if they don’t let Yoonchae go wild now, she might go out at sixteen and, like, get a bunch of piercings. This is a thought that actually keeps Sophia up at night sometimes, because she’s becoming her own mother, and Yoonchae’s face is so perfect the way it is now.

Sophia pulls her dress back on, and doesn’t think about how that feels. Manon’s getting dressed too, arranging her hair and leaning over the bathroom sink to wing out her eyeliner. “I have a brunch meeting,” she says by way of explanation. She holds up her phone; she’s calling a Waymo. “I was going to cancel, but you’re here, so.”

“With who?”

“You don’t care.” Sophia hates being told what she does or doesn’t care about; she opens her mouth, but Manon waves it off. “No, it’s seriously not interesting. It’s that same broker.” She’s blotting her lipstick. It’s making her words come out muffled. “You can eat anything in the fridge. Yoonchae can show you where stuff is. It’s kind of all over.”

“I was going to take her out for breakfast,” Sophia says, which is the truth, but she wouldn’t want to be here without Manon. It would feel too weird.

So they all head downstairs together. In the elevator, Manon scrolls through about a hundred unread texts, and Sophia watches their reflections in the far mirrored wall. Her silky brushed-out hair and Manon’s dark braids, the cups of her dress, the stack of bracelets on Manon’s right wrist. One is thin and silver and used to belong to Sophia’s mom. She hasn’t seen it in a while.

Manon is kind of dressed up, wearing this asymmetrical satin top, and Sophia wonders whether this meeting is actually a big deal. She’s remembering Manon’s first shows, the ones they used to get way overdressed for. That part was always fun; matching her lip gloss to paint, testing the print it left on Manon’s bare shoulder.

They used to pose together in gallery bathrooms and wetbar mirrors. They were always photographed at exhibitions. They always looked good together.

Maybe Manon is thinking the same thing. She puts her phone away as the doors slide open. Sophia averts her gaze.

In the lobby, Manon asks, “What did you think of the show?”

Sophia is not surprised, not really. The only thing that surprises her is that Manon cares. They both know that Sophia doesn’t really have taste in art. She likes museums if they have cute cafés or places to take pictures. They used to compromise—Sophia went to galleries; Manon sat through movies with singing in them.

“I liked the pink one,” Sophia says. She doesn’t ask about the water.

Manon laughs a little. “Of course you did.” The tag on Yoonchae’s skirt is sticking up; she leans down and tucks it into her waistband. “You could have it if you wanted.”

“It didn’t sell?”

“It wasn’t for sale.” Manon frowns, glancing at her. “It’s of Yoonchae.”

She seems to realize right then that she is basically offering Sophia a giant painting of herself; she looks like she might want to take it back, but she just draws her bottom lip into her mouth and says nothing. Sophia is not sure that what her clean white living room is missing is a six-foot portrait of her ex-wife, Yoonchae or no Yoonchae.

“I don’t know if I have the space,” she says, which is the most polite way she can think of to decline.

Manon looks a little relieved, “Oh, yeah.”

“Mommy, let’s go,” Yoonchae says, tugging on Sophia’s dress. She must be hungry. She lets go to wrap her arms around Manon’s legs. “Bye, Mama.”

When Manon kisses the top of Yoonchae’s head, she smears her lipstick a little. “Wait,” Sophia says; she can’t let her leave like that. She licks the pad of her thumb.

Manon goes very still when Sophia takes her by the chin. Sophia tries to be brisk. She wipes the corner of Manon’s mouth, the curve of her cupid’s bow, and then lets her go.

When she steps back, she is suddenly very aware of her own body, of how much space is between them and how much space has been between them at any given time in the last three years. She slept beside Manon last night; she fell asleep listening to her breathing. There’s no reason for the three of them to still be standing in this lobby, not when she and Yoonchae aren’t waiting for a car.

She takes Yoonchae’s hand, but doesn’t move. At last, Manon says, “Thank you for coming.” Her phone buzzes; her ride must be pulling up now.

“Thank you for texting me,” Sophia says. There’s an awkward stretch of seconds after that where they’re all still walking in the same direction. But once they’re out on the sidewalk, Manon heads for the curb, and Sophia and Yoonchae turn.

Sophia has lipstick on her fingers. She finds a Kleenex in her purse and wipes it off. She drops it, crumpled, into the first trash can they pass. It’s a bright late-spring day; the sun is bleaching everything clean.

From that point on, it’s no different from any other Sunday morning. They go to the same café as always, and sit at the same high table. Yoonchae will not let Sophia help her; she gets herself up and onto the stool on the third try, eyebrows knit together in concentration, bracing the sole of her flip-flop against the windowsill.

Sophia watches her carefully for any sign of sniffling, but Yoonchae is sucking noisily on her juice box, not seeming very scarred at all. “I have a mommy in Korea and now two mommies here,” she tells the waitress, apropos of nothing, but the waitress is setting down Sophia’s caramel macchiato and just says, “Do you? That’s nice, honey,” not really listening to her.

The bell over the door jangles. Sophia looks up and sees Lara, who is wearing an enormous pair of dark sunglasses. Also—Sophia thinks at first—pantsless, but then Lara spots them and makes a beeline for their table, and when she gets closer, Sophia can see that she’s just wearing very short knit shorts under what she recognizes as Dani’s jersey.

“Lara,” she says. She knows exactly what’s coming, but Yoonchae will yelp and squirm away if she tries to cover her ears. “Not in front of her.”

“Life-changing,” Lara says, mostly ignoring her. “Mind-blowing.” Behind Yoonchae’s back, she mouths to Sophia, I am so hungover.

“That’s great. I’m really happy for you.” Lara grins at her, and Sophia thinks about sheathing the knife, but she’s already committed to sliding it right between Lara’s ribs and twisting, so. “We’ll still see you at noon, right? Yoonchae, are you excited?”

“Uh-huh.” Yoonchae is not paying a lot of attention. Out on the sidewalk, somebody’s little white dog is wearing a sweater.

“Oh, god,” Lara says. She breathes in very deeply, fingers pressed hard against her temples. “Yoonchae, you know how much I love you.”

“I love you too, Lara,” Yoonchae says earnestly, turning from the window, Lara groans like she has actually been stabbed, putting her arms around her.

“Okay, I will,” she says. “For you, babe, not your mom.” She lifts her head. “But I’m going to need four Advil and a Red Bull. And, like, order pho.” Sophia probably will; she has the sense that this vocal lesson is not going to feature a lot of coaching. Also—this is only occurring to her right now—there are a couple of details about last night that Lara would find very interesting, and if she leaves the two of them alone for long enough, Yoonchae might spill.

“This fit goes incredibly hard, by the way,” Lara tells Yoonchae. She tousles Yoonchae’s hair, then goes off to order.

She leaves with a triple espresso and three apricot croissants in a paper bag, which is just disgusting. At the last possible moment, Sophia takes an out-of-focus picture of her back, but then she can’t really think of anyone she could send it to.

Well, one person, but she doesn’t text her about stuff like this. She sort of wonders what Manon has been hearing, though. As far as Sophia can tell, Dani lets Lara take the lead in these situations. Dani’s like Sophia; they are mostly straight, actually, but then they get roped into things. Dani used to say that shit happens was her life motto.

Lara tried to convince her to get that tattooed. It was supposed to be a matching thing; hers would have said, I’M THE SHIT. Dani wouldn’t bite, though.

Manon would remember that. Sophia hits send. She thinks about captioning it, then decides she doesn’t need to.

Three dots fade in and out. Manon is typing. Sophia folds her phone closed; it doesn’t matter that much. Still, she kind of rushes to flip it open when the notification comes.

hahaha

“So,” Lara says. It is 12:14 p.m.; she and Yoonchae sang Love on Top three times before she threw the towel in. Now Yoonchae is parked in front of Sesamstraße with an organic mango popsicle, and Lara is working her way through a plastic quart container of sinigang at Sophia’s kitchen counter. “Can we please talk about how you finally got laid?”

“What?” Sophia says blankly. She has to crane her neck to make sure that Yoonchae isn’t listening, but Yoonchae is still glued to Ernie and Bert and das Krümelmonster. “How I—what?”

“Or you liked that dress so much that you wore it out last night, came home, took it off, slept here, got up, and put it back on to pick up Yoonchae.” Lara raises an eyebrow. “No judgment, babe. I told you it was a serve.”

Fuck, Sophia thinks, she should not have shown her. She took a long shower when she and Yoonchae got home; now she’s in sweatpants and her hair is damp. She gives it about two minutes before the truth comes out, but she still says, “I didn’t sleep with him, okay?”

Lara frowns. “Did you stay at his place?” Then her eyes widen. “Wait, did Manon see you all dressed up? Sophia, did you do that on purpose? Oh my god.”

There is an extremely tiny tamarind broth stain on the white counter, and Sophia takes her time tearing off a paper towel. She can basically hear the wheels turning in Lara’s head. The longer she stays silent, the more time she gives her to develop this theory.

She might as well get it over with. She says, “I slept at Manon’s.”

Lara chokes so violently that a little bit of kangkong actually slithers out of her nose, which is the grossest thing Sophia has ever seen in her life. She shoves the whole roll of paper towels at her and lets her deal with it. Okay, yes, it is news, but Lara does not need to be coughing this hard. Sophia might actually need to give her the Heimlich; her eyes are starting to water.

“Not like that,” she says, and tries to make the whole story as short as possible: Bambi, Manon’s text, the way they both kept all their clothes on. Well, they did change their clothes, but they didn’t see each other naked, and Yoonchae was there the whole time, and—

“Okay, I get it,” Lara says, wiping her mouth. “You didn’t fuck, and you were super weird about it.” She studies Sophia. “Did you wake up spooning each other?”

“No, we did not.” Sophia does not mention the hand-holding, or Manon’s lipstick on her fingers. Her current plan is—loosely—to take that to the grave, and if Manon for some reason tells Dani, she will probably just have to stop talking to all of them forever.

Lara sighs. “You know what?” she says. “Good for Yoonchae. I thought we would have to wait like eight years for her to be old enough to Parent Trap you.”

“Yoonchae doesn’t even have a twin,” Sophia says. Lara just shrugs. “No, that’s, like, the entire plot of that movie.”

“It’s interesting to me that that’s your objection," is all Lara says. She spoons up more soup and sips at it, very demurely.

Leo drops by Sophia’s office on Monday to thank her again; he says it was nice, and it was too bad that it was so hard to find a time. Both of them are so busy. Sophia recognizes this for the out that it is, and takes it, and doesn’t suggest that they could do it again.

He really is nice, she thinks for the millionth time, watching him leave. He’s letting it be easy. He probably would have been perfectly understanding if she had had to run, if Manon had texted her in the middle of their dinner.

It was good timing. Manon texted her right as she was leaving. That thought is only occurring to Sophia now. It was really good timing, almost like Manon had watched the blue dot drift towards the sidewalk. Sophia chews on her thumbnail thoughtfully for a while, skim-reading a compliance memo.

Two days later, Manon texts Sophia, dani thinks she might be bi,

lara told me, Sophia messages back, and then, !!!!

She sees Manon start to type, but then the bubble disappears. A moment later, Manon FaceTimes—oops, habit—video-calls her. It catches Sophia off guard; she blinks at the notification, then angles her phone, frantically combs her fingers through her bangs, and accepts the call.

Manon’s face fills the screen. She starts talking immediately. “Okay, who is this woman? Dani keeps texting me links to Kehlani songs.”

Sophia is at her desk, and has to turn the volume way down. She tries to figure out where Manon is: it looks like New Image. The wall behind her belongs to a back-room Sophia’s been in before.

“She does pole dance,” she says. “And aerial silks. Also, she’s, like, forty-five.” Lara’s told her more, but she can hear Nayoung in her office, typing. Hopefully, anybody passing by in the hallway will think she’s in a Zoom meeting. She balances her phone against her desktop monitor.

“Oh, I heard, believe me.” Manon must get a text. Sophia watches her read it, then swipe it away. She wonders if it’s Dani. “When I asked her when she knew, she said, Between rounds five and six.”

“Ew,” Sophia says, and then thinks twice, even though Manon laughs. “Like, not in a homophobic way.”

“No, I know.” Manon yawns. “How do you think Lara feels about it?” Why are they calling about this? Why are they video calling about this? It’s not that Sophia minds—she just doesn’t understand, watching Manon lean against the wall, rub at the back of her neck, and then slide down to sit on the floor. Sophia wonders if she’s been taking her paintings down. It’s been more than a month, somehow.

“I think Lara’s having a good time,” Sophia says diplomatically. She and Dani have been together for like ten years—fuck, they are all so old. If Dani’s weird thing about labels bothered Lara, Sophia thinks they would have hashed it out by now.

“You and I were never this bad,” Manon says. “We weren’t, were we?”

“No way,” Sophia says, but then she thinks back to junior year. She never sent Dani and Lara links to songs. Just a lot of blurry pictures of Manon in the back rows of lecture halls, proof that Manon was taking no notes and was not paying attention at all.

Sophia takes Friday afternoon off and uses most of that time to meet with her accountant, which is not exactly the glamorous life she imagined she would have at nineteen. But she also thought she would be famous, and have, like, six little designer dogs. The point is that for once, she picks Yoonchae up from school.

Yoonchae is not as jazzed about this as Sophia kind of hopes she will be. She imagines Yoonchae racing across the playground to her. When she arrives, though, Yoonchae is in the time-out corner.

She’s sitting, scowling, beside a little girl whose bangs are chalked pink. Megan, Sophia remembers; she hears about Megan and her pink hair all the time. Yoonchae’s teacher tells Sophia, “They’re upset because their imaginary mermaid tails are the same color.”

“Okay, bunny, this is not how I raised you. Say you’re sorry.” Sophia wonders how Manon would handle this; she can only imagine Manon bursting into laughter. Yoonchae, that is dumb as hell. Or having a not-very-serious hippie take on it: sometimes our auras overlap with each other.

“Sorry,” Yoonchae says. Then she sticks her tongue out, but it makes Megan giggle, so Sophia lets it go.

Yoonchae trots off to her cubby and comes back with her lunchbox and a complicated crayon drawing, four pieces of thick white paper Scotch-taped together. Sophia unfolds it as they walk through the parking lot, and thinks she’s looking at trees. That might be her in the bottom left corner, with Yoonchae beside her.

Manon is there too, along with some kind of—weird dog? Yoonchae always draws the three of them the same way: herself and Sophia in pink, all of them with long black hair.

“Is that me?”

“You and me and Mama,” Yoonchae points. “And Bambi and his mama. We all went to walk in the forest together.”

It’s just a story, Sophia guesses. She and Manon are not that outdoorsy. “And then what happened?” she asks, even though they’ve made it to the car. Something dramatic with lots of scribbled black lines is going down on the right side of the paper.

Yoonchae hums. “It was snowing. The hunter came, but there was a sign that said, NO HUNTERS ALLOWED.” Sophia can almost read it, actually, now that she sees the vision; they just need to talk about how many lines belong on an E. Yoonchae cups her hand protectively over Bambi’s spotted-crayon back. “You pointed at the sign and yelled, so then he ran away.”

Oh, Yoonchae, Sophia thinks. “I did that?”

“Uh-huh. You reprimanded him.” Yoonchae pronounces it carefully, which is so cute that Sophia has to cover her whole face in kisses. Yoonchae puts up with that for a couple of seconds, then squirms away from her. “Too much, Mommy.”

Sophia relents. “Sorry.” She opens the car door and waits for Yoonchae to climb into her booster seat, then buckles her in. Yoonchae shifts herself obligingly. “What happened after the hunter left?”

Yoonchae has to think. Sophia guesses that was the end of the original story, “We went to eat kimchi and maekjeok and jajangmyeon,” she says finally.

“Do you want to go eat kimchi and maekjeok and jajangmyeon?”

Yoonchae nods furiously.

“We can do that tomorrow.” Sophia knows where she wants to go: this one place in K-town where they loop early BTS videos on flatscreen TVs, and the waitresses slip her milk candies. She hesitates before she starts the car, though, thinking about their three figures, side-by-side.

She asks, “With me and Mama?”

Yoonchae counts on her fingers. “With you and Mama and Bambi and his mama.”

“Okay,” Sophia says slowly. “I’ll see what I can do.” She can text Manon tomorrow. She can maybe have two stuffed deer overnighted to the condo. She thinks about how much that might cost, and how much she would be willing to pay. Right now, conservatively, looking at Yoonchae’s serious little face, twenty thousand dollars. She might see if they make life-size models; that seems like something Disney might do.

When they get home, she lets Yoonchae break into her nice makeup, by which she means she lets Yoonchae smear Chanel lip gloss over her whole chin. Then she wipes Yoonchae’s face clean and, at her instruction, draws kitty noses and whiskers on both their cheeks with her potted cream eyeliner.

Before she washes her face, she takes a picture of the two of them, Yoonchae’s cheek squished against hers, Then a selfie, lips pursed a little. She’s still wearing her work clothes, her charcoal pinstriped suit, and it kind of matches. Before she can talk herself out of it, she sends them both to Manon.

meow.

She watches until the little checkmarks turn blue. Manon sends an image back, and Sophia has to wait for it to load.

It’s not her face. It’s a screenshot. Her mom has replied twice to Manon’s Instagram story.

Manon!! Always so beautiful!!!!!!

and then,

We miss you very much. 💕

After her bath, Yoonchae tells Sophia drowsily about something that is going to happen next week—her class is going to see tigers, or maybe a play or a puppet show about tigers. She isn’t totally clear on the details and Sophia guesses she will find out from the Monday email blast what this is, and whether it is going to happen at the library or the zoo.

Yoonchae might also just be making it up. It doesn’t really matter. She falls asleep before Sophia gets even five pages into Animalia.

Sophia tucks her in and kisses her forehead and turns her little plug-in nightlight on. She goes to the bathroom and wipes the eyeliner off of her face. Then she goes out into the living room and stands there, trying to figure out what she wants to do. She works past midnight on Fridays, usually, so that she can spend her weekends with Yoonchae. She could, like, sit down and watch a movie. She hasn’t done that in a while.

She could clean the kitchen. She could finally use that lemon myrtle bath bomb. She could lie across the couch and scroll on her phone for three hours, which is probably what she is going to end up doing, but at least she’s being, like, intentional about it.

The intercom buzzes. It jolts her. Who is knocking on her door at nine-thirty?

She makes her way to the panel. “Hello?” she says dubiously.

“Hi, Sophia.” It’s Manon, down in the lobby. “Can I come up?” Her voice is tinny; static crackles in the space between her words.

Then in the silence, stretching on. Sophia is touching her mouth, she realizes, Manon sounds strained when she says, “Just for a little while.”

As she pulls the door open, Sophia is still dealing with the shock of Manon’s voice piping through the speaker—Manon here at this time, here with no reason to be here. And then Manon is actually standing in front of her. Manon is at her door and Sophia has to confront the reality of her. She has to look up, so then she looks down. Manon is in stiletto heels.

Her braids are tied up. Her dress is long and slinky, dark red silk, and she is wearing a lot of jewelry, like she was going somewhere else and ended up here.

Sophia says, stupidly, “Why do you look so—”

“So do you.” Manon is staring at her; she looks kind of wild-eyed, actually. Sophia is literally just wearing what she wore to work, and bunny slippers.

“What are you doing here?”

Manon says, like this is a real answer, “I was in the neighborhood.”

Are you drunk? Sophia does not ask. She does not think Manon is; there’s this thing that happens to her voice where it turns all low and raspy. But she can see the rise and fall of Manon’s chest like she was rushing to get here, fumbling with the intercom, jabbing frantically at the buttons in the elevator.

“You’re always in the neighborhood.” For a moment, Sophia thinks Manon might be very late to something else, and might, like, finally thrust that empty Tupperware into her hands, then get the hell out of here.

Manon says, “I know.”

They’re just staring at each other. Manon is still out in the hallway, heels piercing the thick beige carpet, swaying a little to keep her balance with her arms crossed tightly across her chest. No Tupperware in sight. She’s lost her resolve to do something, Sophia senses. Now she’s just blinking, swallowing, and Sophia’s eyes are level with the movement of her throat.

“Shoes,” Sophia says, and steps back to let her inside. Manon hesitates before she crosses the threshold. She looks like Yoonchae, getting ready to jump. Sophia watches her slip off her heels.

Sophia is so good at not talking about things, not acknowledging things; she can talk all day long and say nothing at all. Before Manon can speak, she almost rushes to fill up the silence. But all Manon says, straightening up slowly, is, “That smells good.”

She has maybe composed herself, or at least stopped looking like she ran six blocks in heels to get here. “It’s literally Indomie.” Sophia nudges her heels into place. “There’s leftovers; you could have some.”

It’s really not a real offer, but technically it is the truth. We might be getting better at this, Sophia thinks—very, very distantly. Not even the shape of a thought. Not even a clear outline of one. Right now everything swirling in her head is that way.

“What happened to all organic?” Manon follows her into the kitchen. Sophia has an inch on her again and it would feel reassuring, but they are both still dressed way too formally to stand here in front of the fridge and do nothing. Sophia was at HYBE. She doesn’t know what Manon’s excuse is. The overhead light is off and their shadows are long and too close to each other on the floor.

“I had a long day, okay.” Sophia opens the fridge just to do something, but the white light blinds her and she winces. She lets it close again; all she can see inside is soy milk and carrot sticks. “Do you want wine?”

Manon looks at her, head a little angled. She says, “Sure.”

There’s a bottle of red buried at the back of the pantry, behind the decanted rice. Sophia uncorks it. None of the words on the label really mean anything to her. Manon watches as she pours it into two blush-pink stemmed glasses. She leaves the bottle sitting open on the kitchen counter.

“Classy,” Manon says, taking the glass from her.

“It was a present from somebody.” Sophia doesn’t know if she’s talking about the wine or the glass. “I can get you a Solo cup.” Manon actually laughs, and Sophia’s stomach settles a little.

At least it sinks down from where it’s been sitting, stuck in her throat. They used to drink this thing Dani would make that was mostly tequila and blue Powerade. They used to drink Franzia out of the gross plastic bladder.

Manon raises her glass before she takes a sip. “Cheers,” she says, leaning forward over the island.

Sophia sees her gaze land on the stack of books on the counter. Ramona the Pest, Alice in Wonderland. Sitting on top, Oh, wie schön ist Panama. Manon frowns, just barely, flipping that cover open.

“Do you understand this?”

Sophia does not. They can only get through a couple of pages at a time. Yoonchae gets frustrated with her when she pronounces the words wrong.

“No,” she says. “But she does, so.”

Manon looks at her. She says, “I don’t try to, like, talk to her in Tagalog.”

“That’s okay. My mom does.” Sophia’s mouth feels dry. Instead of drinking, she presses a slit into the cork with her thumbnail.

“You’re really good at this,” Manon says. “Just so you know.”

Sophia thinks of Yoonchae’s pink sleeping bag. She says, “Sometimes I think she likes you more, though.”

The slippers are making her feel stupid, and she toes them off. Manon is barefoot, anyway, with only the white marble corner of the island separating them. Manon holds her gaze for a long beat, then sighs. She holds her glass steady with both hands, sinking down to sit on the kitchen floor.

They used to end their nights like this sometimes back when they still lived in the old apartment, where the kitchen was narrow and pretty much a closet and if they sat facing each other, their knees jostled together. They would get Korean fried chicken from that place in Miramar and spread the boxes out on the floor; Dani and Manon had not ever invested in a dining table. Sophia remembers Dani padding out of her room at three in the morning, yawning, before they swapped places. Dani saying—tongue curling around it, enjoying it—”Oh, you’re still here?”

Manon pats the hardwood. Sophia sits down beside her. She breathes out; she tips her head back against the cabinets. The floor is cool.

Manon is still watching her. As she brings her glass to her mouth, she says, “I never asked how your date went.” Her voice sounds strange and hollow inside the glass, like she’s farther away.

“It didn’t work out.”

“Sorry.” Manon doesn’t sound particularly sincere or insincere. She would have been surprised, Sophia thinks, by any other answer.

Did everyone know? She says, “It turns out you shouldn’t try to date yourself.” This time she’s startled by Manon’s laugh; she wasn’t trying to be funny.

Manon laughs, though, then asks, chin propped on her fist, “Who would you date, though?’ She seems genuinely curious, waiting for the answer. “Dani and I were talking about it. We couldn’t really see you dating somebody like me.”

Sophia thinks about that sometimes—who could she be with? Who would she have been with if she’d never met Manon? Probably, like, a Leo, if Manon had never transferred in, if she’d gone pre-law, if Lara had not dragged her to that one house party. That first house party, where two hours in, something possessed her to say, jittery off of nerves and watermelon Jell-O shots, “I want to try hooking up with a girl.”

Manon was fucking with the playlist, Sophia remembers, bent over some frat boy’s phone. She glanced at her, eyes dark above the rim of her red plastic cup, and asked, “Like, right now?”

“I think you’re just my exception for everything,” Sophia says finally.

Manon looks at her, dark-eyed, then touches the rim of her glass to Sophia’s. The dark silk of her dress is stretched flat between her knees. She does it wordlessly.

“How’s Dani’s friend?” Sophia asks. She tries hard to sound nonchalant. “The one who works on music videos.”

Manon doesn’t, like, sucker-punch her, but she knocks her knuckles against the side of Sophia’s knee. Come on, maybe, or, I knew you knew. Be serious. She says, “Girl, I have no idea.”

The refrigerator makes a weird sputtering sound. Sophia takes her first sip of wine in the silence after. Manon’s hand stays in the empty air beside her knee, hovering there. She starts to tease the seam of Sophia’s pinstriped suit pants with one glossy nail.

“I’m still sorry,” she says. Everything else they’ve said has kind of drifted away, but Sophia feels this lodge in between her ribs. “I know it doesn’t make a difference, but I’m sorry.”

“I rushed you, though.” Suddenly Sophia finds that she has been waiting for so long to say this; she is basically blurting it out. “I should have listened to you. If you weren’t ready—"

Manon cuts her off. “No,” she says. “Because then we wouldn’t have her.”

“You know what’s crazy?” Dani said years ago, shaking her head. She was dangling her car keys in Yoonchae’s face, watching her grasp at them and giggle. “How you could have gotten a different kid who was total crap,” and then Lara whacked her and said, “That’s literally how it works for everybody.”

But Dani was kind of right, Sophia thinks, because Yoonchae is perfect. And, like, Megan is cute, but Sophia knows her to be a biter.

“We were really, really lucky.” Sophia is still watching Manon’s hand. She has to pull her gaze away to look at her. “I wish you would have talked to me.”

“You didn’t want to hear it.” Manon’s tone has hardened, just around the edges; it’s laced with something sharper. She has a point, though, and Sophia doesn’t move, and Manon doesn’t shift away from her. She just tugs hard on the fabric of Sophia’s pants. “What did you really expect to happen, Sophia?”

Like Sophia doesn’t know by now that she can’t tell the future. Sometimes she can’t see five minutes into the future. Three years ago, she thought Manon just needed air. She thought Manon would stand out on the sidewalk for a while, breathing, and then come back upstairs and lift Yoonchae up out of her crib, and it would all get better.

An hour ago, she thought she was just going to go to bed.

“I shouldn’t have left,” Manon says. She seems subdued; she scrubs her hand across her eyes. “I think about it all the time.”

Sophia says, “I thought we were going to have a daughter.” Manon turns to her, a little surprised; she thought they’d let the question die. But Sophia has this feeling she has not had since she used to lead high-school plays—her cue, her mark, the light. The blind instant before everything else fell away, and the shock of clarity. Only this time the whole audience is Manon beside her.

“I thought we were going to have a daughter,” she says. “I thought Yoonchae would be our daughter. I thought I was still going to be married to you. And I would come home from work, and you would both be there. And we would put her to bed and I would sit on the kitchen floor with you.”

The slant of Manon’s mouth is a little rueful. She says, “And fight about how to wash her hair?”

“No,” Sophia says, She swallows this time. “I wanted that, too.”

Manon kisses her over the rim of Sophia’s glass as she hauls her to her feet—the glass Sophia has not made a dent in, the glass that’s still full. Manon’s teeth graze her bottom lip and her grip goes on the stem goes slack, and wine goes sloshing up and out and soaks the silk.

Red wine all down Manon’s right hip. Sophia gasps against her mouth. “It’s fine,” Manon says, “it’s fine.” She’s fumbling for the glass, pulling it from Sophia’s fingers. Behind her, Sophia hears the base go clattering across the counter.

Now both her hands are on Manon’s back, roaming up and down her spine—slippery silk, bare skin above it, and she is kissing her back harder. She bangs her hip against the edge of the counter, curses, but Manon’s hand is there already. She soothes the bruise that hasn’t formed yet as she sucks one onto the underside of Sophia’s jaw. Then she comes up to kiss her again, and Sophia is swallowing, swallowing, swallowing hard. She wants ten things at once; she wants Manon’s fingers in her mouth; she wants to lick her perfect collar bone.

“This is so hot.” Manon is palming her chest, pulling at the lapel of Sophia’s blazer. Somehow she has eased Sophia up on to the counter. With her free hand, she is kneading the underside of Sophia’s thigh.

“It’s from Nordstrom Rack,” Sophia says, like an idiot.

“Okay, don’t tell me that,” Manon says patiently, and waits for Sophia to wrap her legs around her.

She has missed her so much. She has missed sex so much. Once Manon sat her down on a different kitchen counter, then drove the strap into her. She is remembering one thousand ways in which Manon has made her come—she could ride Manon’s thigh right here, or she could wait for her fingers. She keeps squeezing tight around nothing, remembering Manon’s hands, coming on her back with Manon’s fingers stretching her, Manon’s lips pressed into her hair.

Her blazer slips down over her shoulders. Manon is thumbing at her buttons, but Sophia likes this shirt, so she bats her hands away and does it herself, quickly. She’s up on the counter in her suit pants, in her unlined bra. Manon is kissing her between her breasts, mouthing all feverish at the skin there.

They desperately need to stay quiet. Sophia has to pull Manon’s head back so that she can press a finger to her own lips, pointing down the hallway. Manon nods, but she is still stroking Sophia’s thigh, her thumb brushing against the top of her inseam over and over.

Every time, new heat pulses through her. Manon is watching her. Something possesses Sophia to ask her, “How long?”

“God, like two months.” Manon kisses her shoulder. Not Dani’s friend, then. “It was this girl—it doesn’t matter. She was so weird. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“I want you to,” Sophia says, and means it. She fingers the thin strap of Manon’s dress. Manon has been with girls who were not her; Sophia has always liked to hear how much more Manon likes her, how much better she is. This time, how much Manon has missed her.

Manon raises her eyebrows. Sophia’s stomach squeezes.

“Three years,” she says, and watches Manon’s eyes darken.

Maybe she should feel embarrassed, but all she can think about is what is about to happen. It doesn’t matter now and it will matter even less once Manon is touching her. Once she’s on her back and Manon is making her come, and Sophia’s bralette is peach lace, and she can’t remember whether her underwear matches at all, but whatever.

“Manon,” she says. “Come to bed,” and then, in the hallway, “I want you, like, everywhere.”

After, they lie in Sophia’s bed, facing each other. Sophia’s curled on her side; Manon is on her back with her head turned, her braids draping dark over the pillow. Real silence stretches long when once there was static in between them—something tense and charged in the air, and real static from the monitor.

Sophia’s wrists ache. Her fingers ache; the soles of her feet ache. Her whole body feels kind of sore and slack and worked-out, not in a bad way.

Weirdly she kind of wishes that she and Manon could share a cigarette, which she has literally never done in her life and has not even really seen in movies. She wants desperately to open her mouth, but hasn’t worked out yet what she wants to say. She wants something to fill this time, to push back the moment when they’ll have to talk to each other.

Or she’s just thinking of all the times she’s seen Lara spit her gum into Dani’s mouth. She used Manon’s toothbrush the first time she ever slept over. Manon ran it under hot water for her.

Manon lays her hand palm-up on the mattress between them. Sophia takes it.

“What does this mean for us?” Manon asks. At last. One of them had to.

“I don’t know.” Sophia’s murmuring. They’re murmuring again, but it doesn’t feel like it used to; nothing they’re saying right now needs to be said any louder. Yoonchae is snoring softly in the room down the hallway. “Whenever anything happens to me, I want to text you.”

“I always thought that if you wanted to be with me again, you would just make it happen,” Manon says. She shakes her head a little. “You would just call me and tell me that we were back together.”

Oh, Sophia thinks. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth. Would it have really been that easy? All this time? Maybe not, though—BITE ME, in Manon’s neat, rounded handwriting. Sophia regrets the notes. She would take the notes back if she had a time machine.

She says, “I was kind of trying not to do that anymore.”

“Sophia,” Manon says, sounding helpless. Then she’s rolling over, crushing their joined hands under her hip—ow—and crushing their mouths together.

Her eyelashes flutter against Sophia’s cheek, and she tastes like the last traces of Sophia’s lip gloss. They taste like each other.

Water can lift, too, Sophia thinks—suddenly, blurrily. Yoonchae in her pink water wings. Yoonchae floating on her back in the bathtub, strawberry shampoo in her hair. Sunset and dawn kind of look the same and the sky will be rosy in three hours, and she was going to know Manon for the rest of her life, anyway.

“I think we were stubborn in the wrong direction.” She says it against Manon’s lips; she doesn’t spend that much time thinking about whether it makes sense, or if that’s even a thing. She makes herself exhale slowly. “You know what my mom always says? The secret to marriage is not getting divorced.”

Manon buries her face in Sophia’s hair. She says, muffled, “Well, we never did.”

“No.” Sophia eases her cramping wrist out from under Manon’s hip. Their hands are still joined, and she strokes Manon’s knuckles with her thumb. “So maybe we could try it the other way.”

“What would that look like, though?”

Sophia gave up on fifteen-year plans about three years ago, she’s been realizing, when it started to seem like nothing ever went how she’d thought it had been going to. When Yoonchae started to walk and talk and Sophia realized she was just going to be her own whole entire person, no matter what she did—and even more than that, that's what Sophia wants for her. Maybe Yoonchae will grow up and get sleeve tattoos or pierce her perfect mochi cheeks or drop out of college to be a pop star, and Sophia will just have to keep on loving her so much that sometimes she feels like it will come bursting out of her skin, and then she has to text videos of Yoonchae singing to Lara and show Yoonchae’s school pictures to her accountant, who does not care.

She used to keep flyers in her bag for Manon’s shows. She used to recruit random strangers to come after she’d already rounded up everybody they knew, the people in line in front of her at the grocery store. “Sophia, you are so embarrassing,” Manon said, head in her hands. The week before, she would refuse to go anywhere with her.

Look, Sophia could say. If it doesn’t work out this time, we can’t be weird about it. But why, like, jinx it? Slowly, she unlaces their fingers.

“Let’s just sleep on it,” she says. It’s three in the morning. She rolls over. The world around them is still dark, and she remembers how they used to sleep. She can still feel the warmth of Manon’s body beside her.

“Who even are you?” she hears Manon ask, sounding a little incredulous. She closes her eyes. The world is dark and soft, and Manon’s fingers curl into the crook of her elbow.

“Don’t you know?”

She feels the tips of Manon’s braids drift over her bare arm. Manon’s lips graze her cheek; she kisses her there and then on the temple.

“Maybe,” Manon says, and lets her cheek rest against Sophia’s shoulder. Sophia breathes in deep, and some things haven’t changed. She uses the same shampoo; Manon wears the same perfume. On a piece of paper somewhere they’re still married to each other.

Sophia wakes up in a bed that is so warm that she blinks in confusion, thinking that Yoonchae has had a bad dream and crawled in beside her. But then she remembers what she is remembering, whose arm is slung over her waist, who is breathing against her shoulder.

Ew, she thinks, we did wake up spooning, and she presses her lips together around a smile. She kind of lets that knowledge seep through her whole body. It makes her wriggle her toes against the sheets; her heel knocks against Manon’s ankle. “Ouch,” Manon says sleepily, and then, “Okay, Prince Charming,” when Sophia finds her hand and brings it to her mouth, uncurls her fingers so she can kiss her there.

They’re both barely awake and so is the whole world. No noise is floating up yet from the street, and the sky is still hazy. The annoying wild parrots are just starting to squawk outside. Only Yoonchae is awake, standing silent and wide-eyed in the doorway.

Sophia bolts upright, clutching the sheets to her chest. Already she is thinking, like—what does Yoonchae know about sleepovers? Beside her, Manon sits up, rubbing at her eyes blearily.

“Hi, Mommy,” is all Yoonchae says. She tilts her head. “Hi, Mama.” Then she shuffles around to the left side of the bed, climbs up onto the mattress, and presses her nose almost up against Manon’s. “I want toaster waffles.”

Before Manon can open her mouth, Sophia says, “They’re whole wheat.” She remembers again that she and Manon have no clothes on, so she covers her eyes with her free hand. “Yoonchae, really quick, let’s play hide and seek.”

Yoonchae races out of the room, and that buys them a few minutes—enough time for Manon to go through Sophia’s dresser, for Sophia to splash water in her face and yank a brush through her hair. Out in the living room, the curtains are drawn tight and swaying suspiciously. As they creep towards them, Sophia says, “We can never tell Lara.”

She gives it three hours, give or take, before Lara and Dani know somehow. Part of her wants to text them a photo of Manon’s dress lying on her floor.

Manon glances at her. “Oh, yeah, no,” she says, then hesitates. “We should maybe think about how to tell your mom, though.”

“I have a playlist for you,” Sophia says to her later. She’s wiping some light maple-syrup fingerpainting off the kitchen counter. Manon is unloading the dishwasher. Then she thinks about what she has actually added to it over the last three years: a lot of angsty second-gen k-rock, Kisapmata, the breakup song from High School Musical. “I don’t even want to play it for you, though. You can’t make fun of me.”

“Girl, that’s nothing.” Manon sighs, closing the cabinet door. “I have paintings that I couldn’t show anybody.”

Paintings, Sophia thinks. “Okay,” she says. “You can listen while you show me. That way, it’ll, like, cancel out,” and when she turns back around, Manon is there and kissing her fiercely, one hand flat on the countertop and the other coming to rest on her hip, keeping her there.

Yoonchae is swanning around the living room in Manon’s stained silk dress, tripping over the hem. Manon is wearing Sophia’s clothes, her pajamas. Her worn gray t-shirt and ancient track pants. Somehow, she found the two things Sophia owned ten years ago, and Sophia slides her fingers up under the hem to feel the warm small of her back.

She curls her thumb into Manon’s waist beads. Manon kisses the corner of her mouth. Sophia is kind of, like, unlearning how to not touch her.

“I missed you all the time,” Manon says, drawing back. She looks like she wants to laugh. Maybe she does, and Sophia wouldn’t mind, but sometimes Manon is being earnest and just looks that way.

In the long term, Sophia will work hard on reining herself in, but something tells her Manon will let her boss her around for a little while. “We have dinner plans,” she says. She can do this without ducking out of Manon’s arms; she slips Manon’s phone out of her pocket, and the passcode is still Yoonchae’s birthday. Manon does laugh then, just a little, against her shoulder. “We need to find two stuffed deer.”

Notes:

[1] epilogue: manon and sophia renew their vows at silangan gardens. it's meant to be way more low-key until sophia's mom gets involved. yoonchae is of course the flower girl and her dress is extremely pink and poofy. lara, dani, and gabriela debut their controversial throuple at the afterparty. yoonchae and megan's playground situationship weathers many dramatic ups and downs in the years to come. and they all live happily ever after <3

[2] manon's portraits were inspired by this zeinab diomande painting which was exhibited at new image a while back!

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