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because Ron was now with her best friend.
    She ate because Ron had seen her naked, and he’d fondled the cellulite on her thighs as if he’d discovered a rare artefact. And then shortly afterwards he’d stopped calling.
    She ate because at night she dreamed of the two of them together and saw Ron removing Elizabeth’s clothes, one piece at a time, slowly and with immense delight.
    She ate her way through the hurt until one day she didn’t need to eat over it anymore. The pain had passed, and she could talk to Elizabeth again without faking her affection. She could honestly wish them both well.
    And she could meet the eyes of the man at the gym who’d been watching her. The one who showed up on alternate days, always at the same time. He wasn’t as tall as Ron, or as slender, but there was a take-charge quality about him that she admired. He moved from one workout machine to the next in fifteen-minute intervals like clockwork. And when he was done with the machines, he pulled on a lightweight black knee brace (the result of an old soccer injury, she would later learn) and did some laps around the track.
    She started to run when he did, knowing that if he came up behind her he’d see the way her rump jiggled in her tight black workout pants. He’d know that she carried some weight on her bones, that she wasn’t some naturally thin woman. She was at the heaviest weight she’d ever been when he smiled at her after his run; if he thought she was attractive at that weight, then there was hope.
    Marie made sure to be at the gym when Barry was there. She smiled when he caught her eye. She made it clear that she was interested in talking with him. She laughed at his jokes. He picked up on her cues and asked her out for a drink. Oh, she’d been so lonely.
    Later, when they had married and the children had come and her life seemed to be spinning out of control with the chaos of parenting, she scolded Barry as if he were her third child. He raised his voice too much with the children. He didn’t laugh with them enough. He needed to loosen up. He was out of the house all day—he didn’t have any excuse for being impatient.
    But she did.
    If he’d known her well enough then to read between the lines, he’d have known she was talking about herself. She was impatient. She didn’t laugh enough with the children. She needed to loosen up, not fatten up. Had he noticed that she’d put on weight?
    In the early years, when the children were babies, there had been some winters when they hadn’t gone outside for days at a time because of cold snaps that had stubbornly parked over the city for weeks on end. And if she did go out, by the time she got all their winter gear on and was sweating herself, they would play outside for ten minutes and then cry to come inside again. Yes, there had been plenty of bad parenting moments. Teething. Diaper rashes. The constant squabbling between the siblings. Some days it seemed as if the walls had closed in and the world had simply shrunk to the size of her bathroom. She remembered grabbing one of the girls once and shaking her hard before throwing her on the bed. Blind rage. The kind where you stand outside of yourself and know full well that you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing but you just can’t stop.
    And then a little child would sidle up beside her and say, “I’m sorry, Mommy,” as if her anger could disappear just like that. Oh, to be a child and move from emotions so rapidly! It took Marie time to let go of her anger. Sometimes a lot of time.
    But she had worked hard to develop her patience. She did it for her children because she wanted to be a good mother. And she had gotten better. The work had paid off.
    But she still had dreams sometimes. And she’d wake in a cold sweat because she knew she had it in her, the ability to abuse something that was less powerful than herself.

SEVEN
1999
    In her thirty-sixth year, when Elizabeth had embryos inside her and was waiting to