“For the show, Mommy.”

Shit, the show. A kindergarten reenactment of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in which Ella was to be that crucial “one green leaf.” The show was at eleven a.m. There was no telling if I’d make it.

“You’ll be too tired for the show if you stay up, Peanut. It’s way too early,” I said, pushing her door open with my foot. “You’ll need more sleep or you’ll forget all your lines.”

Ella’s eyes were already half closed by the time I was tucking her back under her pink-and-white-checked duvet and her massive, colorful menagerie of stuffed animals. Reading to Ella in that bed had always made me feel like the little girl I’d never been. And on a good day, it could almost convince me that I was the mother I’d always hoped I’d be.

“Mommy?” Ella said as she snuggled up against her huge red frog.

“What, sweetheart?” I smiled hard, trying not to think about how crushed she’d be when she realized that I wouldn’t make her show.

“I love you, Mommy.”

“I love you, too, Peanut.”

Now that I was finally back—not perfect, not by a long shot, but much, much better—I did everything I could to avoid disappointing her. I was about to say something else, to apologize for missing her show, to make promises or offer bribes. But it was already too late to plead for forgiveness: Ella was fast asleep.

Justin was back in bed by the time I returned to our bedroom. I could tell he was not yet asleep despite his best efforts.

“Ella’s show is at eleven today. It won’t take long, fifteen minutes, maybe. Tape it for me, okay?” I headed for my bureau. Nice but practical, that was what I needed to wear. Or maybe professional but unafraid to tramp through the woods was closer to the mark. Yes, that was it: intrepid. “I didn’t get a chance to warn her I was going to miss it. You don’t think I should wake her up to tell her, do you? I hate to think of her being surprised that way.”

I could feel Justin watching me move around the room getting dressed. I pulled on my nicest sweater—the pale blue cashmere that Justin’s mother had bought me, that set off my eyes—then tugged on a pair of my best non-mom jeans.

“I have to teach at ten, babe,” Justin said. When I turned, he was propped up on an elbow. “I can take Ella to school, but I can’t do the performance. I’m sorry, Molly, but you know how the university president has been about professors missing class lately—he’s on a personal crusade.”

“One of us has to be there, Justin,” I said with irrational force. I knew he couldn’t miss a class unless there was a true emergency, and despite how I was feeling, a kindergarten performance didn’t qualify. “I’ll have to stay at the bridge until I have what I need for the story. Assuming I can figure out what that is. This may be an all-day thing.”

“I agree completely,” Justin said. “You need to go out there and report on this story to the best of your ability. This could be a real opportunity, Molly, and you need to seriously nail it. My guess is, Erik’s not big on second chances. Today, you chasing this story is more important than even The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”

Because for me, this wasn’t just a story, of course. Everything I did these days was another plank in the bridge to a better me. I had become what I once would have despised: the living embodiment of a self-help book.

“And what about Ella?” I felt panicky. I couldn’t help it. Letting her down again. Letting her down again. It was playing on a loop in my head.

“Come on, she’ll survive.” Justin laughed, but not unkindly. “No offense, but this isn’t her Broadway debut. And how many shows have you been to this year? Ten?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t been counting.”

Justin pushed himself up in bed and swung his feet to the floor. “You know as well as I do that we’re not doing Ella any favors by giving her the impression that love means never being disappointed.”

“I think she’s already been disappointed plenty, don’t you?”

“Come on, Molly.” Justin stood and beckoned me into a hug. I shuffled over and wrapped my arms around his strong upper back. As he squeezed me tight, he smelled like the menthol he’d been massaging nightly into a torn right hamstring as he lamented the indignities of aging. “You’re a good mom,” he whispered into my ear. “You don’t have to keep trying to prove it.”

But Justin—with his doting parents and idyllic childhood—could afford to live in a world of value judgments and calculated risks. It had been part of what attracted me to him. But it wasn’t easy to be someone’s mother when you’d never really had one of your own. Even before I was depressed, I’d always relied on a single surefire parenting strategy: trying to be perfect.

“Okay, fine,” I said. Because Justin was right. I knew that intellectually, even if I didn’t feel it. “But you’ll explain it to Ella when she wakes up, right? Why I can’t be there? You’ll prepare her that neither of us will be?”

“I’m on it, I promise,” Justin said, kissing me. “Now go kick some writerly ass.”

It was barely light, the world a muted gray as I drove through the center of Ridgedale. Around the manicured green downtown, the trendy boutiques and expensive coffee shops were locked and dark. The sidewalks were empty, too, apart from an old man walking a tall spotted dog and two women in fluorescent tops and coordinating sneakers, jogging and chatting. To the right was the wide stretch of ivy-covered campus behind a tall iron fence, the sky burning orange at the horizon.

It was all so beautiful in the half-light. It was hard to believe how much I’d resisted moving to town when Justin—whose specialty was nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature—first mentioned the professorship at Ridgedale University. Twenty-five miles north and a little west of New York City, Ridgedale was a place we probably never would have considered living had it not been for the university. I’d been afraid that leaving the city would make me feel even more isolated and lonely. Not that Ridgedale was some remote farming village. There was a Michelin-starred farm-to-table restaurant and a dozen good ethnic ones, not to mention the world-class Stanton Theatre, an excellent university hospital, and two independent bookstores. The people in town were an eclectic mix, too, with students and faculty from around the world.

Things hadn’t always been so sophisticated, or so I had been told. The Bristol-Myers executive offices, relocated from downtown Manhattan to right outside Ridgedale three years earlier, had notably increased the percentage of the town’s wealthy liberals. Some long-standing Ridgedale residents—in general, less affluent and more conservative—were still bristling at the proliferation of soy lattes and Pilates studios. They longed for the good old days when the university students could shop only at the campus store or Ramsey’s pharmacy and when the dining options in Ridgedale were limited to pizza, chicken wings, or all-night pancakes at Pat’s.

It was a conflict that often played out in the spirited comments section of the newspaper’s online edition. These battles might have little to do with the article they were appended to, but nonetheless they routinely mutated into personal attacks on reporters. At least according to Elizabeth, who had cautioned me never to read the comments on any of my articles posted online, even those that seemed innocuous. It was the one piece of advice she’d given me, and I had listened. I might have been ready to try my hand at this journalism thing, but I wasn’t steady enough to weather being assaulted for it.

I made a left and a quick right, heading past all that majestic stone on the leafy western edge of Ridgedale University. From there, it was a quick shot to the Essex Bridge, which was far enough away that I was surprised it was university property.