Sarah had met Ruby fourteen years ago, when Ruby was just eight years old, a skinny, pigtailed girl walking down the hall of the Manhattan Music School, where Sarah was the executive director. She’d noticed Ruby right away. Or, rather, she’d noticed Ruby’s father, tall, bespectacled, and a little awkward, one of a handful of men in the sea of women; towering over most of the moms and nannies who sat, waiting on the benches outside the kids’ classrooms as their children shook maracas or thumped at drums. “Miss Sarah, do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a husband or a wife?” Ruby had asked one day after class, staring up at Sarah very seriously.
Sarah had been charmed. “Not at the moment,” she’d said, and Eli had put his hand on Ruby’s shoulder, gently steering her toward the other kids, saying, “I’ve got it from here.”
Eli had taken Sarah to dinner that Saturday night, and to a Philip Glass concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the following week. Eli was more than ten years her senior, divorced, with full custody of a child, employed as a periodontist. Back when Sarah had made lists of what she wanted in a husband, any one of those facts would have been an automatic disqualifier. She’d thought she had wanted a man her age, unencumbered by either children or ex-wives; a painter or a writer or a musician, not a man who did root canals and gum grafts for a living; definitely not a man who’d failed at marriage and already had the responsibility of a child.
But Eli won her over. He wasn’t a musician himself （“Six months of recorder,” he’d said cheerfully, when she’d asked）， but when they started dating he began reading reviews and following classical music blogs. He took her to hear chamber music concerts and piano recitals, where he listened attentively and was unstinting in his admiration for the musicians. “Someone has to be the audience, right?” he’d said. “We can’t all be soloists.” She’d smiled, a little sadly, because once, being a soloist had been her plan. There was a version of her life where the closest a man like Eli could have come to her would be as a member of the audience, where he’d paid for a ticket to hear her play. But Sarah had abandoned that dream long ago.
Sarah loved the way Eli had pursued her with a single-minded intensity; the way he noticed what she liked, the way he always thought about her comfort. If they went out and the weather turned cold, he’d wrap her up in his jacket and insist that she wear it home. If he noticed her enjoying a certain wine at dinner, he’d have a bottle sent to her house the next night. He bought her clothes without asking for, or guessing at, her sizes （later she learned that he’d discreetly asked her best friend）; he gave her a pair of beautiful gold and amethyst earrings to mark their first month of what he unironically called “going steady.” The first time he took her to bed, she’d been delighted, and a little surprised, at how much she liked it. In the real world, Eli was respectful, almost deferential, a feminist who had no problem working with women or treating them as equal. With his clothes off, he was different—self-assured, a little bossy, in a way that Sarah was surprised to find thrilled her.
Best of all was his devotion to Ruby. A man who loved his daughter, Sarah had thought, a man who was a good father, would be a good husband, too. She’d been right, for the most part. Eli had been a wonderful husband, even if Ruby had been a handful early on. Ruby had liked Sarah just fine when she was Miss Sarah at music school, had resented Sarah terribly when things went from being theoretical to actual, and when Sarah went from being a fun companion who showed up on the weekends and took Ruby to get mani-pedis or tea to a full-time, live-in partner to Ruby’s father, who made sure that Ruby did her homework, cleared her dishes, and finished her chores.
It hadn’t been easy, but Sarah had persevered, ignoring the resentment and nastiness, enduring the tantrums and the tears. She’d made allowances after Eli told her that Ruby’s mother, Annette, had walked out before Ruby’s first birthday, and she had done her best to not take it personally when Ruby made rude remarks or hid her house keys or left unflattering drawings of Sarah （her chin extra-pointy, her mouth gaping open, presumably mid-yell） lying around where Sarah was sure to find them. She learned not to flinch when Ruby made a point of correcting anyone who got it wrong: Sarah’s not my real mother. It had taken Sarah years of patience, years of ignoring slights large and small, years of extending her hand and having it slapped away, to finally arrive at the moment, right around her thirteenth birthday, when Ruby had started to soften and began to let her in.