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tone told her to let it be.
     
    “Look at you,” Lorraine said. “Married, kids, big house. Lots of white Cadillac Escalades in the lot. One of them yours?”
     
    “No. I’m the black GMC Acadia.”
     
    Lorraine nodded as though that answer meant something. “I’m happy you found something here, though, to be honest? I always thought you’d be a lifer, you know? Like me.”
     
    Lorraine let out a small chuckle and shook her head.
     
    “I know,” Megan said. “I kinda surprised myself.”
     
    “Of course, not all the girls who end up back on the straight and narrow choose it.” Lorraine looked off as though the comment was a throwaway. Both women knew that it was not. “We had some laughs, didn’t we?”
     
    “We did.”
     
    “I still do,” she said. “This”—she eye-gestured toward the mommies—“I mean, I admire it. I really do. But I don’t know. It’s not me.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’m too selfish. It’s like I got ADD or something. I need something to stimulate me.”
     
    “Kids can stimulate, believe me.”
     
    “Yeah?” she said, clearly not buying it. “Well, I’m glad to hear that.”
     
    Megan wasn’t sure how to continue. “So you still work at La Crème?”
     
    “Yep. Bartending mostly.”
     
    “So why the sudden call?”
     
    Lorraine fiddled with the unlit cigarette. The moms went back to their inane chatter, though with less enthusiasm. They constantly sneaked glances at Lorraine, as though she were some virus introduced into their suburban life-form with a mission to destroy it.
     
    “Like I said, I’ve always known where you were. But I would never say anything. You know that, right?”
     
    “I do.”
     
    “And I didn’t want to bug you now either. You escaped, last thing I wanted to do was drag you back in.”
     
    “But?”
     
    Lorraine met her eye. “Someone spotted you. Or I should I say, Cassie.”
     
    Megan shifted in the chair.
     
    “You’ve been coming to La Crème, haven’t you?”
     
    Megan said nothing.
     
    “Hey, I get it. Believe me. If I hung out with these sunshines all day”—Lorraine pointed with her thumb at the maternal gaggle—“I’d sacrifice farm animals for a night out now and again.”
     
    Megan looked down at her coffee as though it might hold an answer. She had indeed returned to La Crème, but only once. Two weeks ago, near the anniversary of her escape, she had gone to Atlantic City for a mundane training seminar and trade show. With the kids getting older, Megan had decided to try to find a job in residential real estate. The past few years had been all about finding the next thing—there had been the private trainer and yoga classesand ceramics and finally a memoir-writing group, which in Megan’s case had of course been fiction. Each of the activities was a desperate attempt to find the elusive “fulfillment” that those who have everything crave. In reality, they were looking up when perhaps they should have been looking down, searching for enlightened spirituality when all along Megan knew that the answer probably lay with the more base and primitive.
     
    If she were asked, Megan would claim that she didn’t plan it. It was spur of the moment, no big deal, but on her second night down staying at the Tropicana, a scant two blocks from La Crème, she donned her clingiest outfit and visited the club.
     
    “You saw me?” Megan asked.
     
    “No. And I guess you didn’t seek me out.”
     
    There was hurt in Lorraine’s voice. Megan had seen her old friend behind the bar and kept her distance. The club was big and dark. People liked to get lost in places like that. It was easy not to be seen.
     
    “I didn’t mean…” Megan stopped. “So who then?”
     
    “I don’t know. But it’s true?”
     
    “It was only one time,” Megan said.
     
    Lorraine said nothing.
     
    “I don’t understand. What’s the problem?”
     
    “Why did you come back?”
     
    “Does it matter?”
     
    “Not