She grabbed a pen while Lucas scowled at the floor.

“Actually, can I ask you something?” She peered up at him, her handsome prodigy, dark hair, broody eyes. He grimaced in reply. “What do you think of Benjamin’s dad?”

Lucas flopped his shoulders. “I don’t know. He’s a dad.”

Something hung in the air between them, or maybe Cleo was imagining it. The emphasis on dad, like, did it really matter if he was a great human being, a hero of some sort? He was a male and he had spawned Benjamin and at least Benjamin was lucky enough to have one. She held her breath, wondering if they were going to get into it again.

Then she pressed on. “Is he nice, though? Home a lot?”

“God, how would I know?”

“Because you spend most of your free time there?” Cleo signed his forms distractedly. She realized she had put her signature where she was supposed to print her name and vice versa. She drew two haphazard arrows, indicating that they should be switched, and assumed this was good enough. If any of her staffers had turned in such an error-riddled form, she’d have insisted that it be redone. Cleo exhaled, debating asking Lucas for a new form—she didn’t like making mistakes, much less stupid ones. She worried that the administrative staff at school would judge her, find her sloppy. Which she never used to be until MaryAnne Newman showed up in her life again. Now she felt like she was making all sorts of mistakes—maybe mistakes was too strong; missteps felt better, but she didn’t like making those either. She thought of the folded newspaper in her bag with a giant ad about her presidential fitness. Goddamn you, MaryAnne Newman!

Lucas was speaking again. “I don’t know, Mom, OK? He’s . . . fine. I don’t, like, talk to him a lot.”

“Is he nice to Emily?”

Lucas grabbed the forms, headed back toward his bedroom. “Hey, Mom, not everything has to be turned into some feminist manifesto.”

Cleo jumped to her feet. “What does that mean?”

She thought of the two girls he might be juggling—Marley and Esme—and realized she really, really needed to sit him down and make him choose, not just dance around it as she had the other night. She needed to explain why he was being a dick and what a terrible precedent this set. Not just for him but for those girls too. Making them feel as if it were one or the other, making them wonder if they needed to be something more than they were for him, making them morph themselves into something they weren’t.

Or maybe teen girls these days would just shove a middle finger in his face and recognize that he was the problem, not them. That actually seemed more like it.

Lucas stopped, turned back. “Sorry, that came out harsher than I meant it to. I just meant that not all men are the enemy. And I doubt Ben’s dad is.” He swiped his hair from his face and disappeared into his room for what would be the rest of the night. Like it was that simple. Men and women. How people make you believe that what you see is who they are.

Cleo slunk back into her chair. Of course all men aren’t the enemy! She noticed her search results still in her tab. Alexander Nobells. But sometimes, it’s just a fact that they are.

Cleo had arrived at Professor Nobells’s apartment on the Upper West Side with a bottle of wine that she hoped was good. No one had really taught her how to buy wine—her parents were dead by the time she realized that she should know about it, and her sister was across the country now, working and therapizing and doing a good job being an adult (surprising), and Cleo wasn’t going to bother her to ask about vintages and grapes, especially after she’d screamed at her when she came to help just after Lucas’s birth. Besides, Cleo was busy raising a baby on her own, and thus the long and the short of it was that she hadn’t been drinking much wine anyway.

But the nice man at the wine store recommended this Italian merlot, and though she wasn’t a fan of trusting people without doing her own research, she had to acknowledge that this time, she simply was not an expert. Nor could she become one between the time Nobells invited her and now. So she swiped her credit card and hoped for the best. She didn’t love wine or any alcohol to begin with. It made her lightheaded too quickly and sometimes it flared up her rosacea, though that was unpredictable at best. If Cleo liked anything in life, it was to be in control, so whether it be wine or a skin condition, she did whatever she could to mitigate unpredictability. (The irony of her unplanned pregnancy was not lost on her. Maybe a therapist would tell her that part of her skipped the condom intentionally, so she had something, someone to call her own. Cleo wasn’t sure. Georgie probably had some thoughts too, but Cleo wasn’t interested in asking.)

His building was fancier than she expected, though she didn’t know why. Maybe it was his low-key professor vibe, which quelled his smarmier, flashier law-partner vibe. The doorman called up and announced her; then she was shown the elevator, and then Professor Nobells was opening the door to his rambling three-bedroom. He had books stacked upon books and a bunch of oil paintings that looked expensive. Cleo hadn’t taken Art History at Northwestern, but these paintings, in gilded frames and highlighted with overhead lights, reeked of wealth, and Cleo felt a little bit over her head. After retiring from the ballet, Cleo’s mom had painted for the love of it, to keep that part of her alive; though she had a following in Seattle, it wasn’t as if her works were commissioned by MoMA, and Cleo had never paid close enough attention to differentiate what set good art apart from great art. Georgie had taken most of her mom’s paintings when she, Cleo, and their grandmother packed up the house; Cleo had a few in a closet wrapped in Bubble Wrap.

“I brought wine,” she said, and she was already embarrassed. This wasn’t a date, for God’s sake! He was her teacher, and he was married with two children a little bit older than Lucas! “I didn’t know if you and your wife drink red, but here you are.”

The apartment smelled like butter and chicken and rosemary, and though Cleo didn’t wish for a man to cook for her in perpetuity, she was glad that for tonight, one had. She wondered what his wife was like, if she was as beautiful as he was, if she was as intelligent. She thought, despite her mildly palpable crush on Professor Nobells, that she could learn from both of them. How to negotiate a mortgage on a three-bedroom on the Upper West Side, how to cook a perfect chicken, how to raise kids in a world where it seemed like, soon enough, big tech would be able to implant chips in their brains.

Nobells ushered her into the kitchen, his hand on the small of her back.

“Oh, my wife, Amy, she’s away with the kids. Florida.” He pulled an apron over his head in one swift motion. “I’m sorry. Maybe I should have told you when I proposed this?”

Cleo felt blood rise to her cheeks, and she worried that he could see straight through her naivete. That she had quickly debated that this might be romantic, dismissed the idea as preposterous, only to discover that maybe it was. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that: it was one thing to stare at your professor from the third row while he lectured. It was another to be invited into his home under the guise of wise counsel and realize that he actually wanted to woo you.

Cleo reminded herself that he was married. And she wasn’t reckless. But he had gripped her shoulder outside of class and run his hand down her arm and palmed the small of her back just a minute ago, which sent an electric pulse up her spine.

Nobells uncorked the wine and reached for two crystal wineglasses he had at the ready. He poured them generous fills and then raised his glass, so Cleo followed, her head still spinning, her brain trying to keep up, her heart racing so quickly that it felt like it might explode inside her chest cavity. She wondered if he would say something suggestive, something even mildly romantic. She hoped not, not because she didn’t every once in a while fantasize about him kissing her from her seat in the third row, but because she knew this wasn’t how she wanted to be seen. Cleo McDougal was a serious person, a serious student, and she wanted to be treated as such. (She thought. Mostly.)

“To hoping my chicken is as good as I promised.” He grinned.

And she grinned too. “I can drink to that.”

They clinked their glasses, and then they did.