Seven Steps to a Successful Apology

horrible cunt hope u burn in Hell wth hitler

The text bubble glowed in the dark bedroom. Nicole had been shocked out of sleep by the phone beeping and shuddering against the glass nightstand. She blinked at the small screen: 3:14 a.m. and an unfamiliar area code. It had to be a wrong number—just an angry stranger misdialing into the night—but it still turned her stomach. She had guilt the way others had intestinal ulcers or eczema, too easily inflamed. She powered off the phone and lay back into her pillow. Everything was fine, she assured herself. And tomorrow would be better than fine. Moreno would never have e-mailed “Come by my office at 2 for the big news” if the news wasn’t good.

“OWIE! OWIE! MOMMY! DADDY! MOOOOOOOMMY!”

Nicole opened her eyes to find morning light filtering through the white curtains.

“Bloody hell. Can you calm them?” Her husband, Jai, spoke without lifting his graying head from the pillow.

Rubbing her stiff neck, Nicole shuffled down the hallway to where the girls were screaming and stomping on the parquet floor. For the first time since the January move-in, the apartment’s windows had been left open overnight, and a cool spring breeze carried the rush-hour honks from West End Avenue.

“Priya hit me!” screamed Esther.

Nicole crossed her arms, and the two girls raised their imploring black eyes to her. They also had Jai’s black hair, but their skin came halfway between his Bengali brown and her Pale of Settlement snow, a pale unlike anyone else in her family. Her red hair, natural until recently, was also odd. Some ancestress must’a been raped by a Cossack, her mother once told their hairdresser, years before Nicole knew what rape was and her mother forgot the word for hair.

“Priya, why did you hit Esther?”

“She. Called. Me. Fat!”

Her dimpled arms were propped on a roly-poly waist, lips pursed between two bulbous cheeks. Fat kids were cute kids, but maybe it was time to stop caving in to her constant demand for french fries. Then again, the poor girl had decades of calorie counting, stair-mastering, self-hating ahead. Why shorten the respite of childhood?

“Esther, it was wrong to call your sister fat. But Priya, what did we say about physical violence? It’s the biggest no-no. So you have to apologize first.”

“NO!” Priya squeezed her eyes, causing her cheeks to puff out still more. “NO! NO! NO!”

“Like mother, like daughter,” Jai muttered, wedging past, bitter over the loss of shut-eye. Not so long ago, her husband would mock his wife’s obstinacy, her ability to turn any trifle into high drama, with a suppressed smile and a flare of affection in his eyes.

Nicole frowned at Priya. “If you don’t say you’re sorry, then no Friday chocolates for you!”

A low blow delivered instead of a teachable moment. Her daughter’s plump face crumpled with indecision. Nicole pictured, like in a cartoon, the girl’s head turning into a Snickers, a bag of M&Ms. And then, the little face calmed and widened with a triumphant grin.

“I won’t say it, won’t say it, no! Because I’M NOT SORRY!”

“Fine! Esther will get both her Friday chocolates and yours!”

Nicole stormed past Priya’s welling eyes toward the kitchen, by far the nicest kitchen she and Jai had shared in their ten years of marriage. And today she planned on sitting at its lovely marble island, sipping freshly ground Birch coffee while brainstorming tonight’s Facebook post, the exact kind of post she detested: “So humbled to be tenured today—”

“Hey!” Jai called as she passed the bathroom. “Your fuc . . . your phone woke me up. Beeping in the middle of the night! Was it Thomas again? Thomas with another hilarious quip? Parfait bon mot?”

“Jesus Christ, Jai. It was a wrong number, O.K.? You’re going to give me a hard time, today of all days, about a wrong number?”

He...