Amy kept stealing glances at the girls while she thought they weren’t looking. There was a warmness to them, and old soul familiarity. They all looked her in the eye. There was no immediate other-women-weirdness, as Amy had been used to from the city.

Amy thought of the way he left her, without remorse, about the unreturned text messages, as if she had not only never even mattered to him, but never even existed. About the affair with Cassandra, and all those horrible tabloids, and then of the last two and a half months in bed. Her blood  ...

But in two months of invalidism, she had grown to feel an intense compassion and understanding for Leanne. She knew Leanne didn’t even like to be so hard around the edges, as she herself called it, but she had built up a wall of armor over years of doing battle with a lifetime of loss.

She and Monica used to go after work if they didn’t go to a movie premiere, rock show, or store launch. They’d flirt with the moody rockabilly bartender and get free vodka sodas and take home fledgling rock stars, who looked at them with moons in their eyes, like Amy or Monica -- either one,  ...

Amy smiled weakly, but she was still thinking about what Leanne had said; she’d spent a sleepless night in the dark with those words, looking at the emptiness, taking responsibility for it. And thinking about changing, about how badly she wanted to.