The sadness in Alice’s eyes hurt Tina. She put her work aside and went to give her old friend a hug.

‘I feel horrible.’ Alice started to sob. ‘I feel fucking horrible.’

Tina stroked Alice’s back. After a minute, she got some paper towel then sat on the other stool and watched Joan Didion mooching about. 

‘I don’t know what to say, honey,’ she said eventually. ‘Relationships are hard. Even normal ones.’ The look on Alice’s face let her hear what she’d said. ‘Sorry! I mean conventional, boring monogamy, like Bette and me. I mean, we were at a therapist just yesterday.’

Alice looked surprised.

‘Mhmm. You remember Wendy? She was at our wedding.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘We check in about every six months.’

Tina had a sense of not wanting to share any more. The session had gone okay, but now she had a feeling she’d actually gone there hoping they’d talk about how hard this year had been. What it was like to be work colleagues, how much of their time and energy went to doing or discussing it. On the drive home, Bette, for all her cheerleading in front of Wendy, retreated inside herself. They’d listened to a podcast, a tacit agreement not to talk further. And then last night in bed there’d been a kiss that, countless other times, would have led to lovemaking. But it didn’t. Bette just fell asleep. And how could Tina blame her for that?

‘We had a therapist,’ Alice was saying. ‘Not Doctor Weiss, a guy whose thing was open relationships.’

‘What did he say?’

‘About what?’

‘All of it. What you could’ve worked on.’

‘Well, he said her shit’s up to her and my shit’s up to me – again, paraphrasing. The thing was, I got bored of being with other people, so I stopped. I was fine with her doing it. But I wanted to keep the weekends closed, for us, for the kids.’

Tina nodded. She found polyamory interesting, but she wasn’t sure why. Maybe because it involved a lot of communication? Not that she could do it. For her, physical exclusivity was a red line. Bette’s infidelity had been devastating. But would it have happened if we could’ve just talked more? Tina wondered. And here was Alice, fine with Nat’s need for other people, but not if that meant she and the kids only got the leftovers . . .