“This isn’t about her,” I said.

“Don’t you think it should be?”

I swiveled around to face him. “Do you honestly think I’m the first woman in the history of motherhood to breast-feed for selfish reasons?” He didn’t say anything, but he looked at me like I’d gone totally Brooke.

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. The prolactin started pumping, and I got the relaxed feeling I always got while nursing.

I fixed my hair and straightened my collar. My body worked even if my best friend had dumped me. I knew how to nurture even if I’d stalked every guy who ever agreed to a second date.

I wanted to look beautiful, like the good but not neurotic mother of a strong and healthy child, the wife of a tattooed hottie, the envy of all the playground moms. I wanted her to see my tan face, my strong swimmer arms, the highlighted hair from my first postpartum visit to the colorist.

I switched Alice to my left breast so she was facing my EBF and then I took a deep breath and I turned. The eye contact would look accidental. I would take on the “Oh, is that you?” face of a caught-unaware happy person.

But as I turned, my heart thumping, my face expectant, I saw that there was no one there. Gone was the bald head of my EBF’s husband, gone the happy-go-lucky nephew, and gone the skinny back of the woman who broke my heart. I turned all the way around to see if they were on the slides. Nowhere. No one. There was no glory, no final confrontation where she got to be the contrite Andrew McCarthy to my thoroughly empowered Molly Ringwald. I’d been robbed of my only opportunity to have the last laugh.

“She’s gone,” I told Jake.

“You sound disappointed.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m totally relieved.” I pulled Alice off, but she wasn’t done yet and she dove right down for more. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You’re a barracuda.”

A few days later, we went to the Tea Lounge on Union Street. Jake went up to the counter to order breakfast, and I had just gotten Alice out of her stroller when I spotted a slender, dark-haired guy sitting at a table, typing on a laptop. I started to shake. It was my VLG, or very last guy. The VLG is the one you were with right before you met the one you wound up with. He represents your former life: the person you were before you got a clue, the one who left answering-machine messages for guys who weren’t worth the time.

I’d met this particular VLG online on a hipster dating Website. His headline was cart, horse, pearls, swine, which was just generically intelligent enough to let me project my own heavy meaning.

When I showed up for the first date, he arrived on a Vespa. He took me for overpriced Portuguese, and we stared moonily at one another while making small talk. Within a few seconds, I crossed over to sit next to him parade style. Afterward, I took him to Sonny’s in Red Hook, and we sat on a bench looking at the summer sky. By the time he dropped me off at my apartment, I had written both sets of vows.

“I’ll definitely call you tomorrow,” he said.

I wanted to look beautiful, like the good but not neurotic mother of a strong and healthy child, the envy of all the playground moms.

But he didn’t. I spent the next six weeks fielding his excuses for not being able to see me a second time: He was at work, he had friends in town, his roof caved in, he threw his back out, he was on a heavy dose of Vicodin, he lost my cell-phone number, he lost his cell phone. A month later, he took me sailing off the Chelsea piers, but after that romantic trip, he told me he was leaving the country.

When I met Jake a few months later, I was on the lookout for all the signs of flakiness—but they never came. He called when he said he would, his work never prevented him from seeing me, and he never showed up on Vicodin.

So when I saw my VLG, I saw an opportunity for the closure I didn’t get with my EBF. In the years since we’d dated, I had won. He had to be feeling like Carrie when she spots Aidan and then he turns and he’s wearing a Baby Björn. I was the one who got away.

He stood up and came over. Alice reached out to him. “Hi,” I said. “I have a baby! Time flies, huh?”

“It sure does,” he said, looking nostalgic. It got quiet, and I realized we didn’t have a whole lot to say to each other, we never had, but I’d just convinced myself we did because he was Jewish, artistic, and depressed.