“Sounds great. Have fun tonight, okay?” Heather gave a little wave as she walked out. “See you next week at Huntley.”

Brooke waved back, but Heather had already stepped onto the sidewalk. She was getting ready to leave herself, trying not to wonder if she’d overshared or not shared enough or done something else to freak out Heather, when her phone rang. The caller ID showed it was her friend from grad school, Neha.

“Hey!” Brooke said as she tossed a couple dollars on the counter and walked outside. “How are you?”

“Brooke! I’m just calling to say hello. It seems like forever since we’ve talked.”

“Yeah, it really has been. How’s Boston? Are you liking the clinic you’re working for? And when the hell are you coming to visit?”

It had probably been six months since the girls had last seen each other when Neha and her husband, Rohan, were in New York over Christmas. They’d been close friends in graduate school, living only a few blocks from each other in Brooklyn, but it had been harder to keep in touch since Neha and Rohan had moved to Boston two years earlier.

“Yeah, I like the clinic just fine—it’s actually way better than I expected—but I’m so ready to move back to New York. Boston’s nice, but it’s just not the same.”

“Are you really thinking of coming back? When? Oh, tell me everything!”

Neha laughed. “Not for a little while. We’d both need to find jobs, and it’ll probably be easier for me than Rohan. But we’re coming to visit over Thanksgiving since we both have off. Will you and Julian be around?”

“We usually go to my father’s in Pennsylvania, but he’s been saying they may go to my stepmother’s family’s this year. So there’s a chance we’ll just suck it up and host in New York. If we do, will you guys come? Please?” Brooke knew both their families lived in India and neither one especially celebrated Thanksgiving, but they would be such a welcome distraction from all the intense family time.

“Of course we’ll come! But can we just backtrack for a second, please? Can you even believe what’s going on in your life right now? Are you pinching yourself every day? It’s just the craziest thing ever. What does it feel like to have a famous husband?”

Brooke took a deep breath. She thought about being honest with Neha, telling her how much the picture had turned their world upside down, how ambivalent she felt about everything that was happening, but suddenly it all seemed too exhausting. Not really knowing how to handle it, she just laughed a little and lied.

“It’s amazing, Neha. It’s just the coolest thing in the world.”

There was nothing worse than being at work on a Sunday. As one of the more senior nutritionists on staff, Brooke hadn’t endured regularly scheduled Sunday shifts in years, and she’d all but forgotten how lousy they were. It was a perfect late June morning; everyone she knew was having brunch outside or picnicking in Central Park or jogging along Hudson River Park. A group of teenage girls in jean shorts and flip-flops sat gabbing and sipping smoothies at a café a block from the hospital, and it was all Brooke could do not to tear off her lab coat and hideous clogs and join them for pancakes. She was just about to walk into the hospital when her cell phone rang.

She stared at the screen and debated whether or not to pick up the unfamiliar 718 area code that indicated an outer borough, but she must have thought about it too long, because it went to voice mail. When the caller didn’t leave a message and called back a second time, Brooke got worried.

“Hello, this is Brooke,” she said, instantly certain she’d made a mistake and the mystery caller was going to be a reporter.

“Mrs. Alter?” a timid voice squeaked through the line. “It’s Kaylie Douglas. From Huntley.”

“Kaylie! How are you? Is everything okay?”

Just a couple weeks earlier, at their last session before school broke for the summer, Kaylie seemed to take a turn for the worse. She’d abandoned her food diary, which until then she had been diligent with, and had announced her determination to spend the summer on a punishing workout regimen and various quick-loss diets. No attempt at trying to talk her out of it seemed to work; Brooke had only succeeded in bringing the girl to tears and an announcement that “no one understood what it felt like to be poor and fat in a place where everyone else is rich and beautiful.” Brooke was so worried that she had given Kaylie her cell phone number and insisted the girl call her anytime over the summer, whether anything was wrong or not. She had certainly meant it, but she was still surprised to hear her young patient on the other end.

“Yeah, I’m okay. . . .”

“What’s been going on? How have your couple weeks off been?”

The girl started to cry. Big, gulping breaths interspersed with the occasional “I’m sorry.”

“Kaylie? Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Oh, Mrs. A, everything is such a disaster! I’m working at Taco Bell and I get a free meal every shift and my father says I have to eat the free food, so I do. But then I come home and my grandmother’s made all this fattening food and I go to my friends’ apartments, from my old school, and it’s, like, buckets of fried chicken and burritos and cookies and I eat all of it because I’m just so hungry. I’ve only been out of school for a few weeks, and I already gained eight pounds!”

Eight pounds in three weeks did sound alarming, but Brooke kept her voice soothing and calm. “I’m sure you haven’t, sweetheart. You just need to remember what we talked about: meat portions the size of your palm, as much leafy green salads and vegetables as you want so long as you’re careful with the dressing, cookies in moderation. I’m not at home right now, but I can check out the Taco Bell menu and give you some healthier alternatives if you want. The important thing is not to panic. You’re young and healthy—go for a walk with your friends, or kick around a ball in the park. It’s not the end of the world, Kaylie, I promise.”

“I can’t come back to school next year if I look like this. I’m over the limit now! Before I was just at the high end of normal, and that was bad enough, but now I’m officially obese!” She sounded almost hysterical.

“Kaylie, you are nowhere near obese,” Brooke said. “And you’re going to have a wonderful year at school this fall. Listen, I’m going to do a little research later tonight, and I’ll call you back with the info, okay? Please don’t worry so much, sweetheart.”