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persists in believing that Mark might actually notice.
    But in fact there is a text from Mark on her phone, as Bridget discovers once she has gotten Julie into her car seat and settled herself behind the wheel to follow Gennie’s car to the yoga studio. (Could they have carpooled? Would it have saved a polar bear if they had carpooled? Index under “pangs: first-world problems, caused by.”)
    b home late tonite. sorry. love.
    It’s not his fault.
    It’s not anybody’s fault. But it would almost be easier if she believed he was having an affair—with, say, some frisky young developer at his mobile gaming company, a pixieish, overpaid recent college graduate bending over for him in the heat of the server room late at night.
    It’s not another woman, though; it’s just work. She knows because she was the same way before she quit her job to stay home with Julie. Bridget and Mark have been married for two and a half yearsnow, and before Julie was born, they had still had appliances from Bridget’s bridal shower they’d never used. Vacation time they’d never taken accrued like cholesterol in their calendars; unread magazines piled up in slick stacks under the coffee table, so high sometimes that it seemed the table’s legs must be about to lift off the floor.
    They still haven’t taken a vacation, actually. That’s the joke. How could they now, on one income?
Ha ha ha. A week full of ha’s.
It’s not his fault. And she’s not so cruel as to throw that irony in Mark’s face.
    Other than the ghost, the only thing that makes Bridget feel terror, real terror, is the thought of how dependent they are on the guys—young, slick, prone to handing out business cards—who own Mark’s company, PlusSign. (
It’s called “PlusSign” because it’s a digital gaming company,
Mark once explained to her, in an email from the office his first week on the job.
If they made dog collars or shoehorns, they’d be called “Plus Sign.”
) The little boat of Bridget and Mark and Julie is now entirely afloat on the sea of PlusSign; for better or worse, they have entrusted their small family’s fortunes and future to two young men in their late twenties who made an enormously popular mobile game in which you run from house to house in an increasingly complex warren of animated subdivisions, sneaking into people’s homes and robbing them, the old-fashioned way, while they sleep. Stuffing their belongings into a sack—which, in a metaphor that Bridget supposes is the analog of Mary Poppins’s carpetbag, expands infinitely to accommodate your loot—while you caper and cavort and race the sunrise and other robbers. In this game, you get extra points if you stop to clean out your victim’s refrigerator.
    Bridget rereads the text from Mark on her phone, then turns her eyes to the rearview mirror to gaze at Julie, snug in her rear-facing car seat and looking expectantly into the mirror Bridget has affixed to thecar’s back window, so that both of them—just inches away from each other but cocooned in their separate seats and facing in different directions—can look at reflections of each other, just like they’re doing now, whenever the fancy strikes them. Bridget raises her phone to the rearview mirror and takes a picture of Julie, smiling into two mirrors at her mother. She sends it to Mark. She doesn’t expect a reply, although a reply would be nice. She looks at the picture of her daughter, her daughter with her clear hazel eyes and her beautiful lashes and the curls of dark hair just now growing long enough to fringe her shell-pink ears.
    â€œBaby girl,” Bridget announces, “we are not going to yoga.”
    Because the strange fact is, sometimes she wants to see the ghost as much as the ghost seems to want to see her.

CHAPTER TWO
    R ebecca Mueller, pretty and much admired, married at an age