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Peter nuzzles my neck in a way that I usually enjoy, but I’m too exhausted to think about what leaning into the nuzzle might lead to.

It’s not that I don’t like the sex. It’s wonderful once it gets going, once everything is firing.

It’s just that getting there can be tedious.

Even though I’ve wasted an hour on social media, the ten minutes it will take to get everything situated for sex with my husband (the stroking, the rearranging of the pillows, more stroking, the lube) doesn’t seem like the best use of time when I could be failing at trying to fall asleep.

I lean just slightly away, and he knows I’m not into it tonight.

When you’ve been together as long as we have you only need to make the slightest bodily movements to indicate your mood.

It’s one of the things I appreciate most about marriage, the shared sign language.

He rubs the sore spots in my shoulders and my neck instead and that is almost as good as the bygone orgasm.

“Her farm does look lovely,” Peter says. “Is it a vineyard or a farm farm? Do they actually grow things or raise things?” Peter grew up in central London. I don’t think he’s ever been on a farm except for the scraggly pumpkin patch we take the kids to in October.

“Her profile now reads, ‘Building our ranch from the ground up with the help of God’s grace.’?”

“What does that mean? Growing the ranch from the ground up? Don’t most things begin on the ground?

You wouldn’t construct something from the sky down, would you?

” Peter is a stickler for both grammar and proper use of language.

I think it’s in the genetic code of most British people.

They can’t help themselves. It’s like they all learned to read from the Oxford English Dictionary while we Americans got our first sentences from Hop on Pop .

His dictatorial command of words served him well at the hard news magazine where we met and where we both worked at the start of our careers.

I left after I had the kids, when I was politely told that my time constraints as a mother would be incompatible with going out on the campaign trail and doing long-form investigative pieces.

Peter left when the time constraints of all our readers precluded them from reading the magazine anymore and it shut down.

“I honestly don’t know what building it ‘from the ground up’ means. It seems like it’s been there for quite some time,” I say. “No one is building. I think she’s just being poetic. There’s the high protein grain. Apparently, it’s made with pig colostrum. Gross. There are cows. They love raw milk.”

“Do they also love salmonella?” Peter scoffs. I ignore him.

“I think they started making soap. Definitely organic eggs. And she seems to breed those chickens. You can actually buy baby chicks. They ship them in the mail. Seems cruel to me. And sheep for wool, which she uses to knit, and they also sell lamb meat. She has a whole online store. You can buy everything in her pictures. Look, I could buy this baby carrier right now!” I click an Instabuy link.

“We have a carrier,” Peter points out. “And besides, Ollie is getting too big. He hates it.”

We do have one, but it’s nothing like this one. We have a secondhand BabyBjorn that’s been passed through my mom group and probably seven babies. It’s frayed on the top where it’s been chewed on and there are stains from various bodily fluids that will never come out.

Rebecca’s baby carrier, the one that is almost always strapped to her chest in her photos, looks like it’s been spun from the rawest of raw silk.

There are no stains, no teeth marks. It fits her like a couture gown as she sweeps the porch, hangs the sheets on a line in the fields, bakes everything from scratch.

Her pristine carrier looks blessed by the gods.

It costs an otherworldly amount too: $575.

Her audience adores the carrier except when she has one of the babies facing out in it.

Then they’re enraged. Then they rail on her for being a terrible mother because everyone ought to know that letting a baby face outward is a massive safety concern.

Her audience seems very fickle. They love her one day and hate her the next.

I think she must just let the baby face out for the camera.

It makes better photos. Who wants to stare at the back of a baby’s head in a picture?

“Was she always a Jesus freak?” Peter asks.

We are not a religious family. Peter’s religion is soccer and mine is lapsed Episcopalian.

I don’t remember Bex being religious at all.

In fact the only time we talked about religion was when she told me her mom had been ostracized by her very Catholic parents for having Bex when she was a teenager.

“Her husband must be religious. She wasn’t into that at all in college. But she does mention God a lot in her stuff these days.”

“You know quite a bit about this woman for not having spoken to her for over a decade,” Peter says. He has said this before.

“Probably about as much as you know about your favorite sports dudes,” I snap a little. “Stats and whatnot.”

“But she isn’t a professional athlete. She’s just some girl on the Instagram.”

A woman, I want to correct him, a woman with eleven million followers, but the semantics aren’t worth getting into when it comes to social media and influencers.

Peter has no patience for any of it. He never even joined Twitter back when it was still called Twitter and almost all of us at the magazine were required to use it.

“The people who want to read my writing will find it,” he always said. They didn’t.

I’m about to drop the phone on the floor and shove it under the bed like I do every night since I don’t have the energy to get up and go plug it in in the bathroom as Goop recommends. But then I get a notification.

Shit! Can someone now tell if you’ve been looking at their profile too long?

Did I accidentally like that last picture of Bex and her six kids milking that cow?

Six feels like too many children to me. Two children feels like a lot of children to me.

I don’t even know how your vagina would handle that many kids.

But thinking about Bex’s vagina feels invasive now that she’s sending me a direct message.

Hey Lizzie, is this you?

It is, right? I have been totally insta-stalking you for a few months now, so I know it is. Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii

She has been insta-stalking me ? Well, that’s sort of nice to hear.

But what is she even looking at? The sad backyard birthday party I had for Nora with the recycled balloon arch I borrowed from my cousin’s baby shower, or did she see my taco Tuesday reel where I very cleverly made a train of taco shells for my twenty-month-old to follow into the kitchen?

(In hindsight that was a terrible idea. We’ll be finding pieces of those taco shells until the kids go to college, but there were five minutes when it looked pretty damn cute, and it got a ton of likes from my small coterie of followers from the neighborhood, which gave me an endorphin boost that I enjoyed too much.)

What am I supposed to write back? And why does her casually cheery tone piss me off so much?

The answer to that is painfully obvious.

She was the one who chose to end our friendship.

She was the one who didn’t show up at the airport to pick me up like she was supposed to or answer my calls or texts afterward.

She was the one who outgrew me and tossed me aside.

She said the cruelest things to me that anyone has ever said.

Yet, I answer her. And I am cheery as fuck when I do it.

Oh my gosh! It’s me. Oh wow, this is such a blast from the past. :) How are you? What have you been up to?

We live in such a strange time where we have to pretend not to know exactly what a person has been up to even though they post about what they have been up to nearly daily—or in Bex’s case, hourly.

Am I supposed to pretend I don’t know about the ranch, the six children, the three-legged goat, all that whoopie, while we message each other on the very platform where I’ve seen all these things?

Oh you know. Just living

Ha. Me too.

The banality of it is soul crushing.

Peter is staring at me now. I’d be staring at me too if I were him. What expression must be on my face as I furiously type to this random person while lying in our bed in the middle of the night?

Emily, I mouth my sister’s name. My younger sibling has been working in Asia for the past six months so it’s never inconceivable to get texts from her at all hours.

Peter rolls his eyes and then blows an imaginary kiss my way before turning over.

I hate lying to him. And he hates it when I keep tapping away at my phone once he goes to sleep.

We both do. We have an unspoken rule that once one of us shuts our eyes the other puts down the phone. I type a quick bye.

It’s late here…going to bed. Great to reconnect though.

Sorry. I always forget about time zones. You’re in New York. I’m such a turd

I smile at her use of the word turd because it doesn’t seem at all like the kind of thing she would ever post in one of her captions and I feel like I’ve gotten a little bit of the real her.

I hate the rush that gives me. Also, I don’t want to correct her about where I live.

Leaving New York feels like a failure. There are a dozen things I want to type, but my fingers are frozen.

She keeps going.

But I really want to talk. It’s important. Maybe tomorrow?

Sure.

Great. Life is crazy. CRAZY. And I have been thinking about you a lot. I think you are the one person who can actually help me