they mostly still wanted children—even the ones who pretended they didn’t out of some silly imperative to seem cool or wild or other or invulnerable or more like a man, as if that’s what men wanted. These young women could be easily led astray by kindness, and Toby didn’t want to have to worry that treating a woman well would result in some sort of expectation of an upward, forward-pointing trajectory. He could not imagine himself on any trajectory right now, much less an upward, forward-pointing one. He knew that was an unpopular point of view for a man in his position—our friend Seth would
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