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I love that she loves it. “It’s so crazy. I can’t wait to get away from my kids and then the second I’m on the airplane I’m scrolling my phone looking at pictures of them,” I say.

“Same,” she laughs.

“And you have twice as many as I do. More, actually.”

“Gray always wanted a big family.”

It’s the second time she’s mentioned her husband with a grimace.

“What about you? Is that what you wanted?”

“For a long time, I wanted what Gray wanted.” She takes a sip of the martini and stares at the sun as it kisses the horizon. “But not so much anymore.”

“No?”

“No,” she replies, and says nothing else.

“Tell me about your kids,” I finally say.

The joy returns to her face. “I’m surprised at how beautiful and messy motherhood has been and how much it has reshaped my identity,” she says.

“That sounds like one of your captions.”

She cringes. “You’re right. It’s hard to turn it off sometimes.”

“Do you write them? The captions?”

“Some of them. A lot of them are scheduled way in advance but I look over everything. I’m hands on. Always checking that we’re on brand.”

It’s a reminder that she isn’t just the housewife frolicking in the field with the barefoot children or the mother baking bread in the kitchen and then drying the linens on the line. She studied finance and management in college. She’s a brand.

“Okay, how about this,” Bex starts over. “You know that scene in the Harry Potter books where Ron is reading Harry his tea leaves to tell him his future?”

I nod. I’d grown up obsessed with the Harry Potter books but Bex had never read them. I’d brought a couple to college as comfort reads and she devoured them.

She keeps going. “Okay, so Ron is predicting the future to Harry and he says, ‘You’re going to suffer…but be very happy.’ That’s how I feel about having kids sometimes.”

It’s so perfect that I want to cry.

“So tell me about your kids. Really,” I press her.

“They’re wonderful. I mean also hard and a lot, but mostly wonderful. They’re all so different. I guess I kind of thought they would all be more or less the same. But they are all exactly who they were when they came out of my body.”

I can’t help but look at her body when she says it. Because it’s perfect. She doesn’t look like she had one baby, let alone six. I’ve only had two and nothing is in the same place where it started.

“You were right earlier when you said I was lonely. I love being with my kids more than anything in the world, and it’s also the loneliest thing I’ve ever done, raising them the way that I have.”

“How do you manage with so many?”

She chews on her thumbnail for a second as if she’s deciding how to answer.

“Once you get past three, it gets easier. They’re like a tribe. They take care of one another. It’s beautiful to watch.” Again, this does not feel like the truth.

“Really?”

“Oh, I got you with that one. That really was a caption at one point. God no. It’s bananas. And we have help. There are babysitters and a nanny.”

I don’t mention that I never see those people on her social media as I mentally check off one of the questions from my moms text group.

“In some ways it does get easier when they’re older.

You’re in the thick of it with two under five.

Alice, my oldest, is twelve and she’s brilliant.

She can play the piano like no one else you’ve ever heard and she composes her own music.

Entire sonatas and also pop songs. I wanted to send her away to a special school where she could focus on it, but… Gray wouldn’t…”

She clams up again at the mention of her husband and I don’t press it. Instead, I ask if I can see a picture of Alice and she shows me two dozen of them, including a video of this little angelic redhead singing along as she plays on a baby grand.

When my phone rings I grab it, excuse myself, and do a quick check-in with Peter.

He sounds tired but happy, relieved that both kids are finally in bed.

I chatter a little tipsily about how insanely gorgeous the hotel is and my ridiculous encounter with Blippi.

He tells me that Nora built a boat out of marshmallows and toothpicks and floated it in the bath and then ate it and we chuckle about the strange genius of our daughter.

It’s so nice to talk to him without the constant tit and tat of who is doing what for the children, without the can you just get up to check on that cry to make sure they didn’t choke in their sleep, did you pack the lunches and the water bottles and the snacks, are the bathing suits still wet, where are the socks, why are there no socks, why are there never any fucking socks for the love of god!

It’s always the negotiation of it all that’s the worst. Should you?

Should I? Can you? We live with the unspoken dictum, We both do it all .

But in reality, there’s no job description in so-called egalitarian marriages: It’s the Wild West when everyone’s supposed to be doing all the things.

The division of labor is simple right now.

He’s doing all of it because I’m not there, so we can’t bicker and I like him more for it.

I mention this to Bex when I get off the phone and she snorts. Actually, snuffles like a pig, but in a weirdly cute way.

“I think that has always made it easier with Gray and me. There was never any expectation that he would ever do anything for the kids or in the house. He made that very clear from the beginning. It was my job—my ‘duty,’ as he called it. So it’s hard to resent him for not doing it.

Our roles were always very clear once the kids came. ”

The two of us are quiet as the sky gets dark and the first stars start to peek out of the twilight haze. We dip our toes into the infinity pool.

“Remember that time we took the train into New York but had no idea how much a hotel room would cost so we had to sleep in Central Park?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “And that guy who worked at the zoo found us sleeping on the bench and thought you were hot so he let us in to see the sea lions.” Bex had loved those sea lions.

She was enamored with them. The dude, who was probably a janitor, was enamored with Bex and kept sputtering off facts like how sea lions can dive seventy feet below the surface of the water.

“Of the ocean?” Bex had said in amazement. “You know, I’ve never seen the ocean,” she added, mostly to me.

I took her to Coney Island later that day. We rode the subway and got sunburnt and drank margaritas out of plastic yard glasses before getting the last train back to Philadelphia. I ask her if she remembers riding the Cyclone.

“Of course.” She places a hand on my knee. “It was one of the best days of my life.” We both take a moment then, but she keeps the memories coming.

“What about the time we entered that hot-wing-eating contest at the stadium and you came in third?”

“Ewwww. Or remember the pasta ‘sauce’ we made out of parmesan cheese and Tabasco?”

“How about the time we dressed up like slutty Wayne and Garth for Halloween?”

We go back and forth like that until the first martinis are done and she pours us two more, which I know I’m drinking as quickly as I downed the Bloody Marys on the plane because I’m so unpracticed at this. Thankfully, it seems like she is too, and I can see her getting as squiffy as I am.

Halfway through my second, I blurt out, “What’s it like to be so rich?”

She laughs. A real big, huge laugh and I’m reminded again how much I used to love it when I made her laugh like that.

“It’s not my money. Or at least it wasn’t for a long time.

It was all Gray’s family money. They made it a hundred years ago from mining and oil wells and it kept trickling down like water from a river that is being tapped dry from overuse.

And they did eventually tap it out. Or most of it anyway.

The new money’s mine. Now I’m making real money. ”

“How much?” This question is insanely bold, but if I don’t ask these things I’ll start to ask her the other things that I might not want the answers to. Why did you abandon me? When did you start to hate me?

“A lot. It’ll be more soon. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, or part of what I wanted to talk to you about. I got a deal, a big one, and I’m gonna announce it tomorrow.”

“So will you be Rodrigo Aguilar rich?” Rodrigo Aguilar was the richest kid in our class at school. He showed up with a new Bentley every semester and had his own personal assistant who actually sat in class and took notes for him.

“Did you hear his dad went to prison? Pyramid scheme!” Bex says.

“I saw that. But what’s he doing? Rodrigo?”

“Running a hedge fund.”

That makes sense. Money makes money, even if your dad is a felon. “So this deal of yours…how does your husband feel about it all?”

“That’s the problem.” She pauses again and massages her temples. It’s dark on the balcony now and her face is only illuminated by the light inside the room. I can still see the dusky outline of the bruise.

“He doesn’t know about it,” she finishes. “And he isn’t going to like it. He’s…he’s traditional about a lot of things.”

“Obviously,” I snort. It’s the closest I’ve come to expressing any kind of judgment about the life she’s chosen.

“Yeah. I know.”

“And he doesn’t want you to do what? To work? You’re already working, aren’t you?”

“But no one knows that. Or if they do they don’t believe it. People are happy to think I just take pictures and videos of my life as a homemaker, right? They don’t think it’s real work and Gray kind of takes that attitude too. But this, this would be a job, a big job, and I know he won’t like it.”

“So what are you going to do?”