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I had Mark’s address from the custody papers. I assumed it would be an apartment, but when I pulled up it was like a mini

version of the White House. A maid answered the door and led me through an all-white living room, past a Carrara marble kitchen,

and out some French doors to the backyard. There was a pool and an outdoor kitchen. She pointed to a stand of silver sheen

trees beyond the pool. “Mr. Mark’s cottage is back there by those trees—do you see it?”

Did I see it? It was a full-sized house, nicer than anywhere I’d ever lived. The maid, like a guide to the underworld, seemed

to indicate she could go no farther, and so I skirted the edge of the pool alone, made it to the dappled shade of the trees,

and knocked on Mark’s door. There was no answer. I knocked again.

All at once, Mark yanked open the door, clearly annoyed. He was wearing a Duke sweatshirt and purple track pants; his long

hair was a little greasy and unbrushed. He had on reading glasses, which he took off the moment he saw me looking at them.

“Well, this is unexpected,” he said.

“We need to talk,” I said. It was weird, being alone with him, familiar even though I was such a different person from who

I was the last time we’d spoken like this.

I followed him into a darkened living room. All the shades were drawn. Mark snapped on the bright overhead lights, which immediately

made clear that this was a den of terrible sadness. There were books and papers everywhere, abandoned half-full coffee cups

on various end tables, clothes on the floor, a pizza box on the coffee table. The furniture was all in an island motif, rattan

with cushions printed with birds of paradise, and this made the room even sadder. Mark sat on the couch, reached over to snag

a towel off the chair so I could sit. The cushion was faintly damp.

“So what’s going on?” he asked. “I saw Dr. Sharp’s report, which was very reassuring. I would have thought you’d be pleased.” He massaged the bridge of his nose.

“I am pleased,” I said, though I was still somewhat numb from my confrontation with Shyanne the previous day. “But we need

much clearer, less expensive lines of communication. At first, I thought you were doing this all to hurt me or punish me.

Then in mediation, I started to understand that you really thought I wasn’t doing well, that I was out of control in some

way. So now I really need to know, Mark. What do you want? What is all this about?”

“Well, what do you mean?”

“Do you want to be part of Bodhi’s life?”

“Obviously,” he said. “He’s my child too, Margo.”

I squinted at him. “Because less than a year ago you were having me sign an NDA promising to drop out of Fullerton College

and never tell anyone Bodhi was yours.”

“Feelings change. Don’t I have the right to my own emotional journey?”

I sighed. It was so tiresome wading through his self-righteous posturing. He wasn’t even very good at it. “Help me understand

how it went down, how this change occurred.” I needed to know why he had done what he’d done so I could better predict what

he was likely to do next.

“Well, I mean, when your dad called, Sarah was right there! How was I supposed to explain what was going on without telling

her everything? Margo, I don’t know what he was on, if it was alcohol or drugs, but he was slurring and not making sense,

and he kept calling over and over. I didn’t know what to do.”

“So you told Sarah,” I prompted. This was a chain of causality I had not anticipated. It made total sense. Justifying himself

to Sarah had made Mark twist his reality up like a pretzel.

“I told Sarah.” Mark nodded. “And then in addition to being literally afraid for my life, she was furious with me. I stopped

sleeping, I stopped eating, I took a medical leave from work.”

Barf.

“And Sarah, she was so upset. Naturally. About the affair, the be trayal, and she kept saying, ‘You have a child?!’ And in my head, I was like, Well, yes, but not really, Margo has a child, and it has some of my DNA. I mean, I didn’t say that out loud, though I realized that’s what I’d been thinking and there was something really wrong with that.”

Was there, though? I sure wished he’d gone on thinking that way. “So it was Sarah who wanted to sue for full custody?” I asked.

That was the part that didn’t make sense. She might want to shame Mark, but I doubted she wanted to change his other kid’s

diapers.

“She felt I needed to take responsibility,” Mark said.

“And she was already divorcing you,” I said, putting it together, “so it doesn’t affect her.”

“Well, the divorce isn’t final,” Mark said, clearly offended.

“Oh,” I said. Did he think, somehow, that by taking responsibility for Bodhi he’d convince her he was a good guy, and she

wouldn’t leave him?

“Sarah never specifically said I should try to get full custody,” Mark said. “I was seeing Larry about the restraining order

for your dad and explaining the situation, and we both felt, like, hey, there’s a kid over there! What’s gonna happen to that

kid? You know?”

“Christ,” I said. I was suddenly so very tired. Larry wasn’t even a custody lawyer, which in a way explained a lot. I noticed

an Uncrustables wrapper on the floor. There was no changing Mark. Or Jinx, or Shyanne, or how the world worked. They were

like chess pieces: they moved how they moved. If you wanted to win, you couldn’t dwell on how you wished they’d move or how

it’d be fairer if they moved a different way. You had to adapt. The thing I needed to know was whether Mark truly cared about

the OnlyFans. He could continue to pursue full custody and take me to court, no matter what the 730 said. He might not win,

but he could bankrupt me trying.

“I need to know how strongly you feel about the OnlyFans.”

“Well,” Mark said, “I mean, according to Dr. Sharp it isn’t problematic at all!”

“I’m asking whether you will continue to pursue full custody as long as I’m still doing it.”

“I thought you were getting into real estate,” Mark said, a bit snide.

“I’m trying to decide exactly what I’m going to do, which is why I’m asking. To me, it seems absurd that a man I slept with over a year ago gets to decide how I make a living, but that’s the position I find myself in.”

“I have to confess something,” Mark said suddenly, with an I’ve been a bad boy excitement. “I bought your Rigoberto video. And I have to say, from an artistic standpoint, I was really quite impressed.”

So weird, so gross. “Thanks,” I said, praying he wouldn’t say more.

“It just— It wasn’t what I had been picturing,” he said.

As much of a nitwit as Mark was, I knew what he meant. I hadn’t been expecting Arabella’s account to be what it was. I hadn’t

expected to think pro wrestling was a form of art. I hadn’t expected infidelity to be about cuddling or drug addiction to

be about eating Milky Ways.

“Will you do me a favor, Mark? I get you being worried about Bodhi, or about decisions I’m making professionally, but can

you try reaching out to me directly? Because I think the things we make up in our heads, the assumptions we make, wind up

being much worse than what’s really going on. Like, just call me! You never needed to file papers in the first place, come

talk to me.”

He nodded, then his brow furrowed. “Could I— Do you think I could meet him? Bodhi?”

“Of course,” I said. “Whenever. But I need to know, if I keep doing OnlyFans, are you going to continue pursuing full custody?”

“No,” Mark said. “I don’t really think full custody... I mean, you’re his mother. You’re all he’s ever known.”

I was embarrassed that my eyes almost filled with tears. I hadn’t expected Mark to say something so decent.

“I don’t know,” Mark went on. “In mediation, you just seemed so much more in command than I’d been expecting, it really changed

things.”

That black blazer, I thought. Worth every penny.

That night, I looked at the pink binder I’d been putting together for CPS. In it, I’d made a twelve-month financial plan for transition ing to real estate based on a template I found on a website called Templates4Everything.com, which had absurd slogans like “Cut your business time in half!” I flipped through the pages. I closed the pink binder. Set it on my desk. Regarded its flat bubblegum exterior.

I hated the entire plan. I hated the binder. I hated the idea of going into real estate, of spending hours and hours a day

away from Bodhi to pursue something I didn’t want to do and had no idea if I’d even be good at. I hated Maribel. I hated being

tongue-tied and cowering. I hated having to toe the line of rules I knew were stupid. I hated being afraid.

But I was afraid. I could feel the blind, blunt grasp of bureaucracy closing around my life. The scariest thing about Maribel, I realized,

was that she wasn’t a true villain; she was kind of an officious busybody convinced she was on the side of right. Someone

completely inane in charge of whether I kept my baby. I wanted to do whatever would get her to leave me and Bodhi alone. If

that meant following the rules, then I’d have to suck it up and follow them. Or at least that’s what I’d thought before I

talked to Mark.

When lo, a vision came unto me. And that vision was of Ric Flair, his tan old-man skin gleaming with oil, his peroxide-blond

shoulder-length shag shimmering. Ric Flair, greatest heel of all time: a man who would beg his opponents for mercy and then

jam his thumb in their eye, a man who won pretty much only by cheating, a man so famous for pretending to pass out they named

it the “Flair Flop.” And in this vision, the Nature Boy appeared before me in his glittering bejeweled robes, lit by a neon

glow, and said unto me: “Margo. To be the man, WOOOO, you gotta beat the man!”

I opened my laptop and did a couple of quick searches, my pulse racing. I clicked and clicked, reading the articles as fast

as I could. It’s amazing what you don’t find if you aren’t looking for it. I called Ward even though it was ten at night and

I’d already bugged him earlier about Mark getting to meet Bodhi. He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, Ward,” I said. “Wanna make a little more money and help me with some case research? I think I may have been going about something all wrong.”

Like any woman fully in charge of her destiny, I tried to stack the deck in my favor, in this case stopping on the way to

buy Ward donuts. When I got there, Ward said, “I’m really not sure what you’re hoping to accomplish with this, Margo, and

I don’t want to get your hopes up.”

I set the pink box on his desk, the aura of Ric Flair enveloping me like a protective shield. “Ward, quitters never win, and

winners never quit.”

He opened the box and pulled out an apple fritter. “Jesus Christ, they’re still warm.”

“So did you know there’s no legal precedent for how CPS handles cases against moms who have OnlyFans accounts?”

“Yeah,” Ward said, his mouth full of fritter.

“Well, you know who owns OnlyFans?”

Ward shrugged.

“Leonid Radvinsky. And the other big website he owns? MyFreeCams,” I said. “And I got to thinking, OnlyFans is really a social

media spin on a camgirl site, and camgirl sites have been around pretty much as long as the internet.”

“And how were they ruling?” Ward asked.

“Guess,” I said.

“Judging by this apple fritter, I would say they ruled very favorably.”

“And you would be right,” I said. “But I don’t want to print out pages from some Google search; she won’t believe it if it’s

coming from me. I need you to make it all official and lawyer-y.”

“Right, right,” Ward said. “You need me to scare the shit out of her.”

“Exactly.” I jerked my glazed donut away so Bodhi couldn’t grab it. “And I need to know if there are any cases that don’t fit that pattern too.”

“The thing is, Margo, we can do all that, but the research is going to be expensive. And I’m not sure it will actually get

them to stand down. This would all be a lot easier if she’d done something wrong.”

“She entered without a warrant,” I offered.

“Yeah, but you let her. If someone says, ‘Can I come in?’ and you say yes, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Well, she didn’t exactly say ‘Can I come in?’”

“Then what did she say? Exactly. What exactly did she say?” Ward asked.

Despite his initial skepticism, the meeting with Ward was long and manic, and by the end we’d eaten more than half the donuts

and formed a plan. The following week was fairly uneventful. It made me uneasy. When you’re going to do something stupidly

brave, it helps to have less time to think about it. Still, I took all the old papers out of the pink binder and filled it

with all new papers, carefully organized with a table of contents. We had no idea when Maribel would return. It could be any

moment, or it could be weeks. The pink of the binder became slightly more radioactive with each passing day.

Meanwhile, Jinx found a darling house to rent with a pool he claimed was for Bodhi. “Dad, he can’t even swim yet,” I said.

But I was happy he’d be close by. It wouldn’t be so bad, I realized, having a little more distance. I had to trust that it

would remain that way. Before with my dad, leaving had always meant him being all the way out of my life. It was going to

take some time for me to learn exactly how we could make this work.

I thought of JB constantly and, even though I knew it wasn’t healthy, read his old messages. But I knew I couldn’t prioritize

him.

I also thought of Shyanne. I’d cooled down some, and I knew I didn’t mean it, what I’d said to her about staying out of my

life. She was the only mother I had, and she was flawed, and it sucked, but I loved her. It made me sick, honestly, picturing

her in Kenny’s condo, that clean and ugly place, hopped up on energy drinks, sneak playing poker on her phone. I couldn’t

leave her in there. I’d have to find some way of making peace with her, though I had no idea exactly how I would do that.

All of it made my heart hurt.

But I also knew, nursing Bodhi to sleep each night, that my world would never be without love again. Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know the love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.

As I finally drifted off to sleep, I pictured myself like Arabella, violent and half naked, only instead of shooting people

with glowing cartoon guns, I was loving them so big, so hard and real, that the world began to crack at the power of it. My

mother’s face flew into fragments, shot through with golden beams of light; Jinx’s skeleton body was lifted into the sky.

And Bodhi, Bodhi glowed gold, drinking and drinking the love that flowed out of my body, using it to make himself strong and

happy, using it to grow, his cells doubling and redoubling, his bones assembling themselves with time-lapse speed like a miracle.