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Her parents didn’t notice her right away, not until she took another step forward and said, “Hi.”

“Oh, Lucy, jaani,” her mother said, looking up. Iffat and Lucy looked similar, though Iffat’s skin was a bit darker brown. Her hair was pulled back into a neat braid, and her face was bare; she wore comfortable gray scrubs, her only extravagances the gold band on her wedding finger and the gold chain around her neck.

“Hey, sweet pea,” her father, Andrew, said. He was a tall, slight man with brown hair and hazel eyes. He wore similar scrubs, his hair equally neat, with a matching wedding band on his ring finger. Lucy remembered wishing as a child that she had a matching ring as well. She had felt left out, even then.

“Early night, Lu?” Andrew asked, taking in the sight of her in her flannel pajamas, the smell of food cooking in the kitchen. The store usually closed at seven, but she’d clearly been home for hours.

“Yeah, we closed early today,” she replied.

“You sure they could spare you?” her father teased.

He flashed her an easy smile as he entered the kitchen, setting his things down on the dining table. Lucy knew he was only poking fun, but the words made her bristle. He didn’t mean anything by it, she reminded herself.

“Do you guys want to join me?” Lucy asked, clearing her throat. She felt her voice echoing in the house, too loud, though she was surely speaking more softly than she did at Crawley Books. “I made daal chawal.”

The lentil dish was one of the few recipes her mother had taught her, since it was incredibly easy and quick. Iffat Ansari had grown up in Islamabad, Pakistan, coming to New York at age twenty-four for her PhD in neuroscience at Columbia, where she had fallen in love with Andrew, who was in the same cohort.

They married at thirty and had Lucy a few years later and, as such, were nearing age sixty now, though they hardly looked or acted like it. They still worked long hours, and Lucy had never once heard either of them utter a word about retiring except to say, in a confused tone, “Why would we ever retire?”

Andrew’s favorite saying was one by the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph: “One must work until one drops from exhaustion.”

Lucy didn’t understand that. She agreed one should never be lazy, nor unenthused, but why work so much? Why not take well-deserved breaks? Why not rest and partake in the simple joys of life?

“Daal chawal sounds lovely, darling,” Iffat said. She spoke with an accent, a little desi and a bit British from the British grade-schooling she’d had in Pakistan.

“Let me go clean up,” Andrew said. His accent was all Long Island.

Lucy nodded, watching them head toward the stairs. Andrew put his hand on the small of Iffat’s back as they went up, and she looked back at him, smiling. While they cleaned up, Lucy set the table, then, since they still weren’t down, she made a little salad to go with the rice and lentils.

“It’s ready!” she called. Lucy sat down at the table, waiting. A few minutes later, she called again, still waiting.

Finally, her parents made their way down the stairs, coming to sit with her. Iffat gave Lucy a grateful smile.

“You didn’t need to cook all this,” she said, pulling her chair forward. “The salad would have been fine.”

“She has the time,” Andrew said. He sat at the head of the table, scooping rice onto his plate.

“Yes, I suppose so,” Iffat said, laughing.

They were right; Lucy did have time. Her parents did not. In fact, Lucy hardly ever saw them for dinner. They usually came back at odd hours during the day or night because the lab was open twenty-four seven.

When Lucy was a child, they’d attempted to be home more often and have a more set schedule, but ever since she’d gone to college, they practically lived at the lab. At least they had each other, she always thought. She just wished that she had them, too.

“How was your day?” Lucy asked. She sat on Andrew’s left, while Iffat was on his right.

“Pretty good,” Andrew replied, pouring salad dressing over the sliced lettuce and cucumbers. “We had a breakthrough with one of the amino acid neurotransmitters—” He cut himself off with a wave of his hand. “Sorry, I know you aren’t interested so I won’t bother you with it.”

Lucy almost corrected him. She was interested. She didn’t care if she didn’t understand, she still wanted to hear about what consumed so much of her parents’ time, but she knew from previous experience that it was better not to ask.

Her parents would speak in complicated jargon, then be surprised by and eventually disappointed in all the clarifying questions she would ask. They’d have that pitying look, wondering how Lucy didn’t know “Belmont principles” or “dendrites”; weren’t they common terms? The conversation would grow stilted, and Lucy would leave it feeling sad to be so stupid.

“We did make some good progress,” Iffat said, taking a sip of her water. “Which is why we came home early.”

Lucy nodded. She did a lot of nodding at home, lips pressed together in a small, polite smile. They all continued eating, until Andrew looked over at her. As if remembering, he asked, “How was your day?”

“It was okay,” Lucy replied, swallowing her bite of daal chawal, the rice soupy with the lentil curry. “We closed early to visit Charles.”

“Oh, yes, how is he?” Iffat asked. “He … has the flu?”