Beautiful Partygoer

We’d been in Maine six months, but for the first three our kids had continued to Zoom with their Brooklyn school and then summer had come. And then it was the third week of September, and I was still trying to convince myself that one good thing about being in this place I’d never meant to be was that I might finally become someone other than I was. I’d put an alert on my phone two weeks before and signed on five minutes early to our kids’ new school’s PTA meeting. Sophie’s camera was off at first. I didn’t recognize her name until her face appeared, her background blurred.