The following is from Honor Jones’s Sleep. Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and previously at The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her three children.

The girls were sleeping—they had fought so hard over whose turn it was to take the top bunk that in the end they were both in the bottom, sleeping head to foot. Margaret went in to check on them. Helen was turtled under the blankets. Jo was the opposite—legs bare, her arms thrown one way and her hair the other.

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She had spent half an hour tidying the apartment; it was so small it never took much longer. She could disinfect the whole place with half a packet of Clorox wipes if she wanted to and sometimes did. There were two small white bedrooms with airshaft views and a sunny living room with five feet of kitchen against one wall and a couch against the other. Between them was a pinkish rug with a pattern so faded it was only a rumor, darker patches that could as well have been stains or shadows as design.

The apartment had been renovated for roommates in their twenties, not mothers and children. So there was no hall closet for a vacuum cleaner, no bathtub, and a stove so doll-size it was basically decorative.

The rooms did not reward close inspection. Gaps under the windowsills and behind the radiators bulged creamily with the insulation she’d sprayed from a can to keep out the drafts and the mice. But she liked living with the girls in those white boxes, how snug it felt. Shipshape, she sometimes let herself think.

What was it about watching her children sleep that made Margaret feel so safe? It was like she was both the mother keeping watch and a third girl in the bed, like she was standing guard over herself too. Helen shifted under the covers. She had brought Margaret running with the cry of “Mommy!” but it was only a dream. She was murmuring now. Margaret couldn’t make out the words, just the cadence of a complaint. When the girls were sleeping at their father’s, did they know to call out “Daddy” in the night? No, Margaret knew they didn’t, knew it was always Margaret they first shouted for, whether she was there to answer or not. She battened down the pain, watched until the child settled back to quiet.

She had to get some work done. She dimmed the hallway light to the agreed-upon dimness, took her laptop back to the couch, and began reading. Dear editor, please consider. Dear editor, the time has come to. Dear Margaret, I never wanted to have to tell this story. Dear sirs.

Someone shrieked. Outside the open window Thursday night went past, the sound like blue buffetings of fresh air. She wished she could be out there too, going somewhere, with the night air lifting up her skirt. She felt antsy in a way that was almost hormonal, a teenage itch. She couldn’t make out what people were saying, but it didn’t matter, she got the gist. Someone was slagging someone else, someone was telling an outraged story, someone was discussing the logistics of the night. Distance abstracted the language from the units of its content, turned it into tone and meter and nothing else. She was surprised how much she could understand without understanding a word.

Once, she’d heard a man speaking, his voice abnormally deep and loud—stentorian, she thought. It was an Elizabeth kind of word, and she could hear her mother’s voice in her head for a moment, clearer than the man outside. He wasn’t talking to anyone else, you could tell. She thought, at first, a madman. Each phrase seemed to draw up the next, a dissonance that built and built and hung there, suspended, until he spoke again, answering. That was when she realized, no—an actor. He was reciting. She’d been folding laundry; she stopped and listened. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—” she wished. “To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance—” Nope, she couldn’t make it out. Yet she was moved by the voice without knowing what it said.

She submitted to her inbox, opened another email, read the pitch: “I decided I finally had to share what happened to me because what ensued was a textbook case of the everyday violence women experience in places like offices and literary events. It speaks to the traumatizing effects of toxic male power . . .” She skimmed the submission. Lord, it was long; it just kept going. She skipped to the end, to the call to action: We can no longer, the cost of silence, the head in the sand, the blind eye. “We must not continue to be complicit in the violence lest we let the perpetrators win.”

It had been a few months since the Harvey Weinstein news had broken. She was the only senior editor on staff who was also a woman, so as long as the news cycle lasted, it was her job to tell all the variations on the story, to find new ones in ever more nuanced and disturbing iterations. She edited essays about predators at school, at work, on sidewalks and subways, at concerts and grocery stores, reassessments of desire, reassessments of consent. She believed, of course, in the importance of telling these stories. But she didn’t experience the full shock and outrage that others seemed to feel. She wasn’t surprised—that was the trouble. If anything, she was relieved.

Of course the men were wrong. But they were wrong in a tidy way. These were not the kinds of transgressions that proved that underneath the guise of human love and caregiving was a roiling pit of filthy horror. That other people were so shocked—it comforted her. The hidden truth was coming out, and one thing it revealed was that the world was not as sick as Margaret had feared, that in fact it was full of still-innocent people. The bad news had broken, and it was not quite as bad as she had always thought it would be.

*

She didn’t want Jo and Helen to know about Harvey Weinstein. Not yet. But if she was going to have to pick an introductory predator, a sort of textbook example, he was a good choice. In a perverted way, she liked to look at pictures of him. He was so big and lumpy, with that bulbous nose and medievally pitted skin. What had he had, the pox? It was reassuring how much he looked like an actual monster, an A-list demon. His awfulness was so predictable, so easy to imagine, it didn’t frighten her. How could she prepare her children for the awfulness that couldn’t be imagined? How could she prepare them without ruining their lives? Ezra, their father, wouldn’t help. He had no experience of such things; she was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

She knew she couldn’t tell anyone about this sense of relief. Recently, in her cubicle, she had turned to the young editorial assistant next to her and said that it was just not possible for her to read the word survivor without hearing that song by Destiny’s Child. The woman had covered her mouth and said, “Oh my god. Margaret.”

Or maybe she was just tired. The stories that she edited seemed too neatly packaged. And that was her fault, of course. She was the one who made sure they had all the right components, that they were different enough to keep readers interested but not so different that they weren’t recognizably the same thing. It made her think of the cardboard and clear-plastic containers the girls’ toys came in—Happy Hour Predatory Ken Doll, with fashions and accessories. If the story departed too far from the standard, it wouldn’t be relevant. It might not even be believable.

Above all the stories had to have a villain, and it had to be obvious that everyone would be better off if they were revealed and punished. But in real life it wasn’t always like that. Sometimes the right thing to do was not to make a fuss—if you could be certain that they wouldn’t do it again, if you could be certain that you’d been the only one damaged.

She looked back at the submission. Was this a new angle on the story? Did it make her see things differently? Was she interested in this person’s trauma? No—she wasn’t. And there was that awful phrase: lest we let. By speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we. How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it—that confident plural voice? “I’m really sorry to say we’re going to pass on this essay, but thank you

so much for giving us the chance to consider it,” she typed out. She copied the rejection and sent it back to all the day’s Dear Margarets. The apartment in the light of the one last lamp was no longer white but blue with shadow. Outside the crowds went by, the words Where to? Where to? like the song of some small darting bird. But now she didn’t want to join them—she liked that they were out there and she was in here and no one else could get inside.

In the morning, the street noise would be different. In the morning, it was always children shouting, and they always sounded just like Helen and Jo. The girls would be sitting at the table, eating breakfast or coloring, and at the same time they would be crying out for Margaret on the sidewalk. You would think you knew your child’s voice, that you could never mistake some stranger for that sound. But that wasn’t how it was. Every crying child sounded just like her own. She would have to stare hard at the girls, she would have to touch them or ask them something so they would lift their heads and look at her, to keep herself from running to the window. When they were with their father, it was so much worse. All day she heard them and could not go to them.

On Saturday she would see Duncan, the man she’d been dating. On Sunday she would take the children to the Natural History Museum with Ezra. But first one more day of work and camp. She had signed up the girls for the cheapest option in the neighborhood, which still cost many thousands of dollars, and as a result they were spending the summer in T-shirts that came down to their knees in a stuffy classroom at the nearby Catholic high school, throwing water balloons at the playground for an hour each afternoon. Was it better or worse than her own childhood summers, lying on the lawn? Better. It was better than that.

But what did they think, what did they feel, about their lives? She always wanted to know, was terribly afraid of finding out. Earlier that day Jo had had a meltdown because she wanted bubble gum. She was face down on the sidewalk, shouting about bubble gum. But what if it wasn’t about the gum? “Is something else making you sad, JoJo?” she’d asked. “Are you”—say it—“missing Daddy?”

“You never buy me candy,” Jo had wailed.

If Jo or Helen was confused or bereft about the divorce, Margaret didn’t know how to tell, let alone what to do about it. Children accepted almost anything. They knew perfectly well that things would happen to them and they were powerless to do anything about it. And so they needed to exert themselves in moments like this, when they could, in a small yet crucial fashion, get their own way. Her understanding of this, her ability to accommodate this, was what made her a different mother from Elizabeth. She got down on her knees. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s buy the gum.”

It was the wrong thing to do. Obviously it was the wrong thing to do. Children needed firm rules and boundaries to feel safe. They shouldn’t eat candy every day. Jo was too young for gum; she could choke. Tomorrow she would be a better parent. Next summer, the girls would do something cooler, something more enriching. She would have to ask Elizabeth for some money. She could do it; for the girls she could do that. Her mother didn’t like to talk about how much she’d inherited from her own parents, but she had made it clear that when it came to her grandchildren, she could easily afford to be generous.

Margaret would bring it up next weekend, at the birthday party.

Jo wanted just one thing for her fifth birthday: a pool party at Elizabeth’s house. Margaret had tried her best to tempt her into other options, dangling a park hang with pizza and cupcakes and friends, then upping the offer to expensive spaces they could book with trampolines, ball pits, climbing walls. A Broadway show! Tea at the Plaza! Jo wasn’t having it.

Elizabeth had installed the pool the previous year, and the girls didn’t understand why they weren’t in it every moment of the summer like Neal’s son, Charlie, who lived just down the road. It was the one reason Margaret was glad they couldn’t afford a car in the city. It gave her an excuse to say no. But she couldn’t say no to the birthday party. So all of them, Ezra included, would go to Elizabeth’s for a weekend. The date brooded there atop her calendar. It was just two days, she told herself as she leaned back in bed, as the laptop lay on her belly and burned.

*

A sound, a disruption in the darkness, a hand on the edge of the mattress. Someone had come into the room. She knew it without being able to do anything about it. A basic part of her brain was sending flares of panic down the coiling nerveways. But the rest of her mind remained slack with oblivion, far off in the soft void of sleep. Neuron over neuron, limp and slow and stupid, the mind hauled itself back into consciousness. Synapses twitched, and twitched, and twitched, and suddenly her brain sluiced back in her body and all the signals went through and she woke and went rigid with the old familiar terror.

But in yet another moment it was over. She began to see, and to hear, and understanding followed. A small tousled head was looking down at her, sniffling. Fear, then guilt, then the redemption of action. Margaret lifted the blanket and tucked the child against her body.

Almost immediately, Jo was asleep again. Her feet were cold, and Margaret was glad; this gave her a job to do. She pressed her legs against Jo’s feet, and by the time they were warm, her panic had abated. She always woke into fear, but it wasn’t so bad; in no time the world began to bustle about, calmly and sturdily putting the room back in order. The dresser, the door, the closet ajar, the black lampshade, the sleeping child, the open window, and through it she could hear people again, on their way home now, drunk and laughing and calling out something that sounded almost like her name.

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From Sleep by Honor Jones. Used with permission of the publisher, Riverhead Books. Copyright © 2025 by Honor Jones.