The kid is having a hard time. A really hard time. Like something-has-to-give hard time. Everything looks good on the outside: friends, school, boyfriend, sobriety. New York City, her dream. Her bud and the kid make a plan for a sit-down. Or a lie-down. The bud likes to have these conferences in the big bed. He’s not wrong. The big bed in this apartment is the perfect bed. It’s that bed that gets it just right for anyone who enters, firm enough to give good support but with a pillow top that somehow makes you feel like you’re lying on a hug. It’s a hangout bed when the kids come over, it’s a watch-a-movie-in-bed bed, it’s a bed for a FaceTime call with your best friend. So they convene in the bed. They make some plans. Together. All three of them. All three of us. For a conversation the wife would love to have had one time with her own parents (okay her own mom), to hear them say that she was okay as she was, that it’s okay for her to go on her own path, at her own pace, as many times as she needs to hear it to believe it. The wife takes off her Tuscany bracelet, the one that says I got you, puts it on the kid. I don’t think you’d be a good mom. We think maybe he was wrong. This kid has known me for five minutes. Or months, whichever, the point is she has a history that tells her not to trust me, but this kid has me.