Then Came You

PART TWO. Great Expectations

Marcus and I had gotten married in September. Our wedding was a tasteful affair that included forty guests and cost fifty thousand dollars. No bridesmaids, I’d said, giving him a small smile tinged with regret. I’m too old for all of that. This, of course, got me out of having to include Bettina in the festivities. I cringed, just imagining her coming down the aisle, pinching my bouquet between her fingertips like it was diseased, giving me the side-eye when her father said I do.

We honeymooned for a week in Hawaii — we would have gone even farther away, but seven days was as long as Marcus could take off from work. Six weeks later, I was still tawny, my honeymoon glow maintained and improved with a little spray tan, and Marcus would occasionally twirl the gold band on his finger, like he hadn’t gotten used to it being there. We were having a quiet dinner at home, watching the leaves spinning down to the lawn in Central Park, when he pushed his veal away, half eaten.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He rubbed his hand against his chest. “Just heartburn. We brought in Mexican for lunch.”

I felt an icy prickle at the back of my neck, but I kept my voice calm as I asked him, “How long has it been hurting you?”

“I don’t know. Since this afternoon, I guess.” He stretched his arms over his head, yawning loudly. In our time together, I’d learned that Marcus seemed incapable of accomplishing a yawn, or a sneeze, or any other involuntary action at a volume less than deafening. It should have driven me crazy, but, somehow, I found it endearing. “We got any Pepcid?”

I hurried to the medicine cabinet. When I came back Marcus was rubbing at his chest with his knuckles. Fear tightened screws in my own chest. “I’m calling the doctor.”

“Honey, don’t. It’s nothing.”

Lightly, I said, “We’re paying for concierge service. Might as well use it.”

“It’s nothing,” he said again. . but the way he moved, stiff-legged, to the living room, before lying down gingerly on the sofa, told me otherwise.

It turned out to be a constricted artery — no big deal, the doctor said, but better to deal with it sooner rather than later. Marcus went to Beth Israel that night, and his cardiologist did a cardiac catheterization the next morning. The radioactive dye he injected showed exactly where the artery was pinched. A simple fix, said the doctor, explaining how he’d thread a catheter through Marcus’s chest, inflate a tiny balloon, use a laser to blast away the bits of plaque that remained, then pop in a stent. “Your husband will be good as new!” I held on tight to Marcus’s hand as he lay on the stretcher the next morning, his legs pale beneath the blue-checked hospital gown, his normal smell of cologne diminished by whatever cleanser they’d used on the patch of shaved skin on his chest. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said, and kissed my cheek. I tried not to notice that his breath was stale and his cheek felt sandpapery. Do I love him enough? I wondered. If something went wrong, if I ended up caring for him, would I think of him fondly, or would he just be a burden, a sick old man holding me down?

Up in the hospital cafeteria, in my three-hundred-dollar jeans and a mohair sweater, light and soft, I sipped a cup of watery coffee, imagining, in spite of myself, what would happen if things went badly. I pictured Marcus’s vast fortune as a pie, a pie currently split into four slices, one for each of his children plus a slice for his granddaughter, little Violet, a squat and beady-eyed creature with two crooked teeth, notable only for her ability to produce endless rivers of drool. Unconsciously, I pressed my hand against my midriff. I was over forty and had been on the Pill for more than two decades. Could I have a baby with Marcus? Was it even possible? Maybe it was time to find out.

I tossed my coffee cup and found myself thinking about my own mother. Her parents had named her Lorraine, but when she was a teenager she’d shortened it to Raine. Raine Stavros, first-generation American. Her parents had emigrated from Skiathos, Greece, and ended up running a diner in Toledo, where they gave birth to a fine-boned, tiny-waisted girl with wide brown eyes, a proud, shapely nose, and wavy dark-brown hair.

Lorraine might have become captain of the cheerleading squad and queen of the prom before going off to the college education her parents had spent years saving to pay for. Instead, she got pregnant the summer she was seventeen, and rather than having an abortion or giving up the baby, she had me, and named me Samantha. Her high-school boyfriend said he’d marry her, had even given her a ring, but he enlisted in the army three months before I was born. . and this was during Vietnam. Not exactly an endorsement of what he thought life with a wife and a baby might be like.

Raine — even before I could talk, she’d instructed me to never, ever call her “Mom”—dropped out of high school. Three days after I was born, she drove home from the hospital, dropped me at her parents’ house, and then, full of righteous indignation, pot, and possibly LSD, she’d taken off with her best friend in a secondhand VW Vanagon to see the world, or at least the parts of it the Grateful Dead were touring that summer. She never really came home.

When I was old enough to understand, my yaya wasted no time in telling me that she was not my mother, a fact I’d already gleaned by comparing her stiff, beauty-parlor-dyed curls and lined face to the ponytails and peppy smiles of my classmates’ moms. “Here’s your mother,” Yaya would say, tapping one fingernail against a picture of a sullen Raine in a dress that looked like it was made out of canvas, with an empire-style waist that gathered beneath her breasts, then fell straight to the floor: a good look, considering that she was four months pregnant when the picture was taken.

“Where is she?” I would ask, and Yaya would give one of her sighs and dutifully pull out the atlas, running her finger across the country to land on the location of the Dead’s latest show. I had more questions—Why did she leave me? and When will she come back? chief among them — but my grandmother’s pinched face, her expression somewhere between sad and furious, kept my mouth shut.

My mother would come home a few times a year and she usually managed to show up around the holidays. She’d appear the day before Thanksgiving or three days after Christmas and, usually, in the week either before or after my birthday, as if she couldn’t quite remember when the actual day had been. I remember sitting at the window, watching her slam a car door shut and bounce up the driveway, still looking like a teenager. There would be presents in her hands, the smell of incense in her clothes, necklaces twinkling against her cleavage, feathered earrings tangling in her hair. There would usually be a man in tow, hanging shyly behind her shoulder, or holding her hand possessively. Sometimes she’d be tan, if she’d been out west or down in Florida. Her hair was long then, dark-brown and shiny, hanging almost to her waist. Once, she’d come with her hair in a hundred narrow braids, with different-colored beads on the end of each one. I sat on her lap and ran my fingers endlessly through those braids, gathering them into bunches, then parting them like curtains.

I remember that her fingernails were always painted, usually either dark red or silver, and that her front teeth had bumpy little ridges on their bottoms. Once she showed up in cowgirl boots made of red leather, and I wanted those boots more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. Easter Sunday, when I was six, she showed up at church in a white lace skirt that turned out to be completely see-through in the bright sunshine of the Easter egg roll that was held on the church’s front lawn (my yaya, in a polyester blouse and black skirt, had hustled her wayward daughter back to the station wagon, hissing “You’re not decent!”).

Raine wore a silver ring on the second toe of her left foot and the Claddagh ring that my father had given her on her right hand. She had a blue unicorn galloping over a rainbow tattooed on her right hip. “Don’t tell Yaya,” she’d said merrily, laughing as she soaped me off in the shower, then gathered me into one of her mother’s stiff, line-dried towels, rubbing my skin until I was pink. It stung, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of complaining. I wanted her hands on me, even if they hurt. I had so little of her — a few snapshots I’d peeled from my grandparents’ photo albums and kept in a shoebox under my bed, a handful of postcards she’d sent from around the country, a feathered roach clip that I’d found behind a couch cushion, and saved without knowing what it was. If I could have gotten that same tattoo, I would have done it. I wanted to be marked as hers; I wanted every moment I had with her to count.

One Christmas Day when I was nine, Raine had arrived, a little tipsy at eleven o’clock in the morning, with a red-and-white Santa hat askew on her head, her mouth bright with lipstick, flashing an engagement ring with a tiny diamond and introducing me to a shy young man who she said would be my new daddy. My grandmother’s face folded tight as she yanked out the pullout couch, muttering in Greek. The man got the couch (my uncle Ryan’s bedroom had been turned into a study), and Raine slept where she normally did, next to me in my single bed, in the narrow rectangle of a room that had once been hers. The faded pink wallpaper was dotted with red and white balloons; the closet, behind accordion-style plywood doors, still held some of her clothing; and her stuff was still pinned to the walls: a blue ribbon she’d won in a swim meet, a Polaroid of her and her onetime best friend at a pick-your-own-pumpkin patch, Jerry Garcia’s face, emerging from a tie-dye swirl on a black velvet poster above the bed.

She pulled me against her, whispering about how we’d move to Los Angeles and have a tree that grew lemons in our backyard. “You’ll love California, Sammie,” she said, telling me about a road that ran along the cliffs looking over the ocean, and a restaurant high on a bluff where you could eat fried shrimp and watch the surfers; the bonfires that dotted the sand at night, and how there was music, always music, everywhere you went. I fought to keep from falling asleep, wanting to stay up all night listening to her, wanting to hear every word.

When I woke up, she was gone. The sheets were still warm from her body; the pillow still smelled like her hair. I gathered it against me, telling myself that she’d come back and take me away, to the house with the lemon tree in the backyard, to the beach with the surfers and their bonfires. We would eat fried shrimp and salty French fries and listen to music all night long. I didn’t see her again until I was seventeen.

In the hospital, with my husband in surgery, with a ring worth more than my grandparents’ house on my finger, I stared out the window and thought about slicing up that pie: Trey and Tommy, Bettina and the baby. What would be left for me? Then I pictured Marcus waking up, how I’d lean over him, backlit by the sun, looking like an angel as I whispered in his ear, Honey, I want us to have a baby. I was ready now. I’d be a wonderful mother, not like Raine. If I made promises, I would keep them.

“Miss?”

An older woman in a Yankees T-shirt had tapped my shoulder. When I turned, she smiled, showing teeth that could have been improved with a few visits to a dentist. I recognized her from the waiting room where we’d sat that morning, me next to Marcus and her beside her husband, who was, from the sound of it, having his hip replaced. “I just want to tell you,” she said, hands clasped at her waist, “that it’s lovely, the way you’re taking care of your father.”

Have you ever. . you know?” Kimmie ducked her head shyly. It was ten o’clock on a hot August Saturday night in New York City, eighty degrees and still humid in spite of the darkness, but the window air-conditioning unit chugging away kept Kimmie’s place deliciously cool. We’d gone to a screening of Blade Runner all the way downtown at the Angelika, and now we were sitting on the futon that took up most of the space in her grad-student-housing apartment, a studio on 110th Street and Riverside with a doll-size kitchen, a refrigerator the size of an orange crate, and a single window that afforded her a delightful view of the brick of the apartment building three feet away. It was a vast improvement over my place, in a no-name neighborhood in midtown, a fifth-floor walk-up that I shared with two other girls, where the single bedroom had been chopped into three prison-cell rectangles by particleboard walls that didn’t make it all the way to the ceiling.

Every morning I took the subway down to Wall Street, to my job as a junior analyst at Steinman Cox, the investment and securities firm, which had recruited me with a six-figure salary and the promise of rapid advancement. One hundred thousand dollars a year had sounded like untold riches, but the money didn’t go as far as I’d hoped, not when I was dealing with New York City rent, paying off my loans, and trying to send a little something to each of my parents every month. The egg money had already gone to pay for rehab. . and “junior analyst” turned out to be finance-speak for “slave.” I worked for an analyst named Rajit, a dark-haired guy with deep-set eyes and bristling eyebrows who came to work every day in a suit and tie, with a gold chain-link bracelet on his wrist and an eye-watering amount of cologne clouding the air around him. Rajit advised clients on investments in the Eastern markets. Every day I’d spend endless hours “building a book,” putting together research about the tin trade in Taipei, or automobile manufacturing in Hong Kong. Once a month I’d be traveling with my team for client presentations, not to the glamorous destinations featured on the firm’s website but, usually, to the Midwest.

Kimmie’s place was tiny, but it was all hers, and she’d filled it with colorful touches. There were brightly colored prints, Kandinsky and Frankenthaler, thumbtacked to the walls, an aloe plant in a dark-blue glazed pot on the windowsill, a jade elephant that she’d bought on our recent trip to Chinatown centered on the coffee table.

“Have I ever what?” I asked her. “Had sex?” I’d let Kimmie talk me into a glass of cold white wine. After the week I’d put in at Steinman Cox, a few sips were enough to get me feeling loose-limbed and a little loopy.

“No, no. Have you ever orgasmed?”

“Orgasmed?” I giggled. Kimmie looked at me sharply.

“Am I saying it wrong?”

“No. Well, I guess most people say ‘had an orgasm.’ And yes, I have. I figured out how to do that by myself when I was thirteen.” Kimmie looked impressed. I shrugged modestly. “We didn’t have cable TV.” I didn’t mention that I’d never had an orgasm during intercourse with any of the three guys I’d been with. I’d never been relaxed enough, and, honestly, I’d always felt a little revolted at the sight of each of them with their clothes off, with their strange, drippy protuberances and unexpected clumps of hair.

“Can you show me?”

“Can I…” I looked at her. She was staring at me seriously.

“I can’t figure out how. It’s very frustrating.” She pointed at her computer, set up underneath the window on the smallest desk IKEA sold. “I went on YouTube to watch, but it didn’t work. I get close, I think. . but then…” She pursed her lips and blew a small, disappointed raspberry. “Nothing.”

My tongue felt heavy, and my cheeks were burning. “You went on YouTube?”

“You can learn lots of things on YouTube,” Kimmie said, unperturbed. “The Times had a story about makeup tutorials.”

“Well, okay, eyeliner, that’s one thing. But masturbation. .” I shuddered, imagining what horrors Kimmie’s computer had disgorged when she’d typed her keywords into Google.

“If you’d show me, then I’d know how.” Her eyes were shining. “I read on a sex-positive blog that women need to take responsibility for their own orgasms.”

“That’s true,” I said, gulping the rest of my wine. “Hey, Kimmie, you’re not looking at sex-positive blogs at school, are you?”

She looked at me disdainfully. “I’m not stupid!”

“No,” I said. I was getting the giggles again. “Just orgasm-challenged.”

She got stiffly to her feet. “Never mind.”

I felt bad. “No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“So you’ll show me?”

I picked up my glass again. In college, I knew people who’d done, or at least claimed to have done, all manner of wild sex-things. Same-sex experimentation, particularly among the members of certain eating clubs, was practically a graduation requirement. The two girls down the hall from me junior year had let it be known that they were in a polyamorous relationship with a guy who lived in the vegetarian co-op and wore skirts to his visual-arts seminars. And, I liked Kimmie. She was the best friend I’d had in a long, long time. . and going through life, or even just the rest of her twenties, not knowing how to have an orgasm was a significant handicap. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

“Excellent!” She waved me off the futon, which she quickly shifted from its upright to its reclining position, then turned down the lamp and lit a vanilla-scented candle, which she set on the coffee table, next to the jade elephant.

“Romantic,” I said, starting to giggle again. Kimmie ignored me.

“Where should I sit? Right here?” She lowered herself and sat cross-legged on the edge of the futon, fully dressed except for her shoes. All she needed was a pen and a notebook and she could have been attending a lecture.

“Wherever you want.” I thought for a minute, then lay on my back on the futon, squeezed my eyes shut, and pulled my jeans and my panties off over my hips. If I’d been by myself, I would have just unzipped my jeans and slid my hand down the front. . but Kimmie wouldn’t be able to see anything that way. I lifted my head, squinting through the half light.

“Can you see okay?” I felt strangely out of breath, giggly and awkward and surprisingly aroused. The whole thing was so weird, by far the strangest sexual situation I’d ever been in, a world away from my grapplings with Dan Finnerty.

Kimmie nodded. I took a deep breath, stretching out my legs, positioning my hands the way I normally did, the left one pressed against my belly (for some reason, I liked the feeling of pressure there), the fingers of my right hand resting against my cleft. I took a quick peek and saw Kimmie sitting back on her heels, watching intently as I started stroking myself with my index finger. I closed my eyes, wanting to squirm away from her scrutiny, wishing I’d shaved. “It’s kind of like this,” I said. “But I don’t know how helpful this is. Probably it’s different for everyone.”

I opened my eyes, enough to see her make an impatient gesture—keep going. I turned my head to the side, concentrating on the sensation, trying to ignore the strangeness of doing this with someone watching. Kimmie was so close that I could feel her breath on my belly. For a minute, I thought that nothing would happen, but it had been a little while, and maybe I was hornier than I thought, or maybe it was the wine, but I was already wet, the muscles in my belly and inner thighs fluttering in the anticipation of release. I wriggled around, getting comfortable, and arranged my fingers the way I normally did, my index finger tapping, lightly and rapidly, then nibbling more firmly against my clitoris. I couldn’t keep from sighing, and Kimmie sighed, too, in approval, I thought, a little cooing noise.

“Ooh,” she whispered. The futon shifted as she leaned closer. I could feel her breath on my belly, her long hair trailing against my thigh, and suddenly this went from being an academic exercise to the most exciting thing I’d ever done. I felt like a porn star, or the way I imagined porn stars must feel, desirable, sexy, controlling their audience even as they lost control themselves. I spread my legs slightly, strumming my finger faster. My voice was strangled as I said, “Watch. . I’m close. .” My back arched. My toes curled. I felt Kimmie’s breath against my face, then her lips against mine, and her tongue slipped into my mouth as I came.

When I could breathe again, I opened my eyes. She was looking at me, a pleased smile on her face.

“Oh my God,” I said, feeling stunned and dizzy, my nerve endings still jangling with pleasure. “What was that?”

“An orgasm,” Kimmie answered promptly, like the excellent student she’d been all her life.

I sat up, reaching for the light down comforter Kimmie kept folded in a basket next to the futon, and pulled it up over my legs. Then I flopped back, feeling delighted, but with a new fear dimming my afterglow. Did this mean I was gay? I’d never even considered it. I’d never looked at a woman with anything resembling desire, just evaluation, and envy of specific body parts — this one’s breasts, that one’s legs. Besides Kimmie, I’d never even considered kissing a girl. . but now, I found, I was very interested in kissing Kimmie again.

I rolled onto my elbow. She was still dressed, in her jeans and her button-front Henley tee shirt. “Let’s see if you got it,” I said, and reached out, brushing her hair behind her ears. She gave me her trickster’s grin, wriggling out of her clothes. Her body, I discovered, wasn’t so boyish after all. . and when I took her in my arms and kissed her, first her forehead, then her faintly freckled nose, then her lips, it felt like I’d been waiting my whole life to end up with her in my arms.

After Kimmie fell asleep, I lay there, sated and content, at ease in my own body in a way I hadn’t been since I was a little girl, wrapped in a towel and warmed by the sun after a morning bodysurfing in the ocean with my dad. Physically, I was at peace, but my mind raced, looking for labels, asking questions about what had just happened, how it would work and whether it could last. Finally, I tried to turn my thoughts to where they usually went at night: to the eggs I’d sold.

They’d warned me about this at the fertility center. The material they’d given me included the number for a counselor to call if I found myself “dwelling” on my donation, and had mentioned that some donors had benefited from talk therapy or the short-term use of antidepressants. I didn’t think I needed any of that yet, but I had definitely found myself thinking about it — dwelling — more than I’d expected.

The process had gone smoothly: I’d donated my eggs in late May and deposited my check when it arrived ten days later. Six weeks after that, my father was in Willow Crest doing a twenty-eight-day inpatient stay, which would include a physical and psychological evaluation, group therapy, individual therapy, music therapy, and art therapy. He’d made me a collage full of pictures cut from magazines — girls running, girls leaping, girls laughing over their bowls of salad — and he’d smiled when I’d told him, straight-faced, that I would cherish it forever.

I knew I wouldn’t be hearing from him for a while. The counselors had explained that residents weren’t allowed to have cell phones or send e-mail. There was one pay phone that was made available for an hour each day, and usually there was a very long line. As my father worked through the twelve steps, they said, he would make amends to those he’d wronged, but I should be patient, should “manage my expectations.” When I’d gone out to Pittsburgh to take him to Willow Crest, he’d come to the door of the apartment to meet me. I’d peered down the dark hallway and glimpsed Rita in the bedroom, but she’d shut the door before I could call “hello.” His hair was clean, cut short, combed back from his forehead, and in the new shirt and jeans he wore he looked better than I’d seen him looking in years.

We had lunch together in the place’s cafeteria, a loud, lowceilinged room that reminded me of a school, with posters on the walls (covered in AA slogans, instead of warnings about Stranger Danger or invitations to the Summer Reading Program), flimsy paper napkins and square cartons of milk. The food, too, seemed intended for children: mac and cheese served on segmented plastic trays; cheap metal spoons and forks, no knives. I’d chattered about my job, turning my pig of a boss into a charming character, telling my dad about the three meals a day they had delivered and leaving out the part about how we got free food because our corporate masters didn’t want us taking longer than twenty minutes for breakfast or lunch. I made much of the Friday-night happy hours, where the analysts would gather in an Irish pub around the corner from our office, a place so generic it could have been plucked from a mall in Minneapolis. In truth, these were grim affairs, marked by too many drinks and ill-advised hookups, and they rarely began before eleven p.m. because all of us worked so late.

“Proud of you,” my father muttered, forking noodles into his mouth. His hands shook as he scooted his tray closer. At twelve-thirty, a counselor wearing lots of turquoise jewelry stopped by the table. “Time to say goodbye now,” she announced. I tried as hard as I could not to look relieved as I walked out into the sunshine.

On the bus ride back to the Port Authority, I’d done my best to reassure myself that it would all work out. Willow Crest had the highest success rate of any place my father could have gone. Besides, he wasn’t a typical addict. He was intelligent; he had people who loved him. People who needed him. Me.

Kimmie sighed in her sleep. Her face was still flushed, her hair a tousled, fragrant mess. I put my hand on her shoulder, shivery with delight. Over our first months in the city, Kimmie and I had spent all of our free time together, reading New York magazine and picking out a restaurant we wanted to try or a play we wanted to see. I was in charge of transportation, using subway and bus maps to figure out the fastest and most economical route, while Kimmie scoured the Internet for coupons and discounts and last-minute tickets, doing such a good job of it that one day, I joked, the performers would pay us for attending their plays, and the waiters would leave tips on our table.

All through July, we’d traded pieces of our history. Kimmie’s parents, Korean immigrants who’d met in an English as a Second Language class in 1975, ran a dry-cleaning shop in Boston. They’d papered Kimmie’s bedroom walls with pictures of every Asian woman who’d succeeded in any field in America. “Michelle Kwan, Sandra Oh, Julie Chen, Margaret Cho, girl in my high school who went to Harvard,” Kimmie had recited as we’d walked to a bookstore in the West Village.

“Margaret Cho the comedian? Isn’t she kind of X-rated?”

“They don’t care. All they know is that she makes a lot of money.” Kimmie and her parents and her sister had lived in an apartment above the dry-cleaning shop that was always steamy and smelled like chemicals, but she’d never worked there. Her parents had decided early on that she’d never set foot in the family business, that she and her sister, Lisa, four years younger, were meant for better things. It had just taken them a while to determine which things those would be.

“We both had skating lessons,” Kimmie began, lifting one slim finger.

“How’d that work?”

She giggled, shaking her head, long black hair brushing her shoulders. “I used to ditch and go to the movies. Then — oh, let’s see. Special science enrichment classes, in case I turned out to be gifted in science…”

“Which you are,” I pointed out. Kimmie had been a Presidential Scholar and a Westinghouse Science finalist. After graduating from Princeton with highest honors, she’d enrolled at Columbia, where she planned on getting a master’s degree in biochemistry before heading south to Johns Hopkins for an MD/PhD.

She shrugged off my compliment. “Not as gifted as they thought I’d be.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Another shrug. “They were disappointed that I wasn’t more musical. That it didn’t come more naturally. My mother had been a violinist. Before they came here.” I knew, because she’d told me already that Lisa was a gifted cellist, a senior in high school currently deciding between Juilliard and Harvard. I knew, also, that Kimmie believed (correctly, I thought) that Lisa was their favorite, that even with a summa from Princeton and three more prestigious degrees to come, they still regarded Kimmie as a bit of a letdown. Nor had they been thrilled when she’d brought Chet home. He was Christian, and that was important to them, but they’d expected her to marry a Korean boy, preferably one whose parents they knew.

“What about you?” Kimmie asked me as we lay spooned against each other on her futon, with her air conditioner humming in the window.

“What about me?”

“Are your parents proud?”

I didn’t answer right away. My father had been proud, of course. He’d graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, the first in his family to go to college, the first not to work in a factory or on a farm. He’d been the one to fuel my dreams of the Ivy League, describing the schools, their history, their grandeur, the brilliant, world-changing graduates they’d produced. It was the photographs of Princeton that made up my mind — a girl, her long hair in a ponytail, perched on a window seat in a dorm room that had a fireplace. I was enchanted by everything I saw — her shiny hair, the dark wood of the window seat, the many-paned window, the fire crackling away.

My grades and test scores were solid, but I knew that it was my essay that had gotten me into Princeton. “The Addict’s Daughter,” I’d called it, and I’d told myself that only a handful of people would ever read it, and my father wouldn’t be one of them.

Parents aren’t supposed to have favorites, I’d written, and probably children shouldn’t, either, but my father and I have always shared a special bond. The first thing I can remember is the two of us reading together—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I’d read a page, he’d help me sound out the hard words, and then we’d go to the kitchen to make his coffee and my hot chocolate. My father taught English to eighth-graders. He loved being a teacher, and his students loved him, and I felt lucky to have as much of his time as I did.

When I was a freshman in high school, he was arrested for drunk driving after he ran a stop sign and smashed into a car carrying a woman and her young son. It came unexpectedly, at least from my perspective. Maybe there’d been signs, but at fourteen all I knew was that one day he was fine and the next day he was in the hospital, in detox, and then, a year later, he was in jail. One day he was a respected, beloved, award-winning teacher, and the next he was in the newspapers, a punch line, a cautionary tale, a joke.

Hospitalization and medicine and therapy gave him back some semblance of normal. . but then he got laid off, and lost his insurance, and began to drink again, and to substitute street drugs for the prescription medication, chasing the peace the meds had given him, that feeling of returning to himself. Now my father doesn’t work at all. He lives with a girlfriend, in Section 8 housing, his life a patchwork of stopgap measures and self-medication.

I’d closed the essay by explaining that I wanted to study public policy and political science, to change the laws so that nobody fell through a flawed system’s cracks again. That had been a lie. I liked the idea of working in government, but the truth was that I needed money to help him — to pay for rehab, or a deposit on an apartment, or whatever training he’d need to get his teaching certificate back. That meant majoring in economics instead of English or political science; it meant taking a junior analyst’s job instead of an entry-level position in an NGO or a think tank. Maybe someday, when I’d paid off my loans and my father was well again, I could do what I’d told those admissions offices I would — get a master’s in public policy, do some good in the world. But until then. . I sighed. On the futon, Kimmie snuggled against me, then kissed my cheek.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“My dad,” I said, with my eyes squeezed shut. “My job.” I could still picture the Steinman Cox recruiters: the man in a beautifully tailored navy suit and a woman whose shoes I’d seen at Saks and whose dress I recognized from Vogue. They’d talked about opportunities and advancement, about London and Paris and Japan. Their brochures were impeccable, their website, a beautiful enticement, filled with shots of attractive young people of many races and cultures talking enthusiastically about everything they’d learned and achieved. Of course, nobody had posted a picture of an overheated office with flickering fluorescent lights, or mentioned that I’d be working in a tiny cube, in close quarters with men who were always shouting, that the walls retained the acrid smell of body odor and fish from the sushi lunches. Nobody said that eighty-hour workweeks were common, and hundred-hour weeks not unheard of when you were working on an active deal, or that your travel would take you to places like Akron and Duluth, where you’d be responsible for things as mundane as hotel and dinner reservations and making sure the Town Cars arrived on time. . and finding the closest strip club, should your boss be the type.

Kimmie propped herself on her elbow and looked at me. “Dad. Job. Anything else?”

“My eggs,” I admitted. “I wonder. .” I began, before stopping and shaking my head.

“Wonder what?”

“I guess,” I said, speaking slowly, “that I’d just feel better if I knew where they went. What had happened. If they were, you know, just sitting around on ice somewhere, or if they’d been fertilized.”

She tossed her hair back over her shoulders. Her eyes were gleaming with what I’d come to recognize as mischief. “I bet I could find out.”

“No,” I said. “We can’t.” I’d signed up for an anonymous donation, where prospective parents could find out only the information I’d provided, and I’d never have to meet them, or answer their questions, or ask them any of my own. Given my family history — given, in particular, my father — it had seemed safer that way. Besides, anonymous donors got a five-thousand-dollar bonus — presumably because our eggs would be easier to place, since we wouldn’t be able to judge the prospective parents and dismiss them because we didn’t like their answers or their looks or the town where they lived or the car that they drove.

Kimmie flicked her hand through the air. “They’re your eggs. You’ve got a right to know.”

“They were my eggs. I sold them.”

“Morally,” she said, “it’s your genetic material. You could make a case that you’ve got a right to know.”

I shook my head. “I signed my rights away. It’s none of my business anymore.”

She looked at me closely. “You really believe that?”

I sat up, pulling my knees to my chest. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a way I could set it up so the kid could find me. I could watch over it. Like Magwitch in Great Expectations,” I said, thinking back to the conversation my father and I had shared the day I’d first mentioned rehab. “I could be its mysterious benefactor.”

Kimmie gave me an indulgent smile. “You live in an apartment with two other girls. You reuse plastic bags. How are you going to be anyone’s mysterious benefactor?”

She had a point. “Well, not now. But someday. I could send cards. Birthday cards. Everyone likes a secret admirer, right?” If I survived Steinman Cox, if I proved that I could endure the shouting and the smells and the stomach-knotting tension and the days that began before the sun came up and ended well after it went down, then someday I’d be in the position to be a mysterious benefactor. All of this would be worth something. It had to be.

I pulled her into my arms again. She giggled, then kissed my earlobe, then my neck. “You are so beautiful,” she said. . and for the first time in my life, the words didn’t make me cringe or blush or feel like a fraud. For the first time in my life, I thought they could be true.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what to wear to the first meeting at the fertility clinic. My clothes, I knew, would make a statement. Too fancy and it would look like I was desperate — or, worse, like I didn’t really need the money; too casual, and it would look like I didn’t care.

I stood in front of my shallow closet, finally taking out a black dress made of a forgiving, stretchy material. It wasn’t, technically, a maternity dress, but it had enough give that I could wear it through the winter if things went as planned.

I slid the black dress off its hanger and sat on the bed with a sigh.

“Just put it on. It’s fine,” said Nancy, who’d agreed to watch the boys while I made the trip to the clinic, sparing me the sixty dollars a sitter would have cost. When I’d asked if she was sure she’d be okay, she’d snapped, “Don’t be silly. I like kids.” Instead of pointing out the ample evidence to the contrary, the way she always called Spencer “Frank Junior Junior,” instead of remembering his name, and declared that she and Dr. Scott were “childless by choice,” I thanked her, then asked her if she could come a little early and help me figure out what to wear.

“It’s not fine,” I said, holding the dress up against me. It felt like I was going on a date, only instead of getting dressed up, fussing with my hair and my makeup, hoping that the man I’d be meeting would like me and find me pretty and smart and interesting, here I was, seven years after I’d gotten married, doing the same thing, only it would be a woman doing the evaluating. And women, as any woman will tell you, are much tougher on themselves and on one another than men would ever be.

I slipped the dress over my head, slid my feet into the low-heeled black pumps I wore to church, and studied myself in the mirror. I thought I looked all right. Maybe this lady, this India Croft, would think that my woven straw handbag (ten dollars at Target with my employee discount) was deliberately whimsical, and wouldn’t guess that I’d picked it because it was the only purse I had that hadn’t been chewed on or spat up in, survived a spilled bottle, or housed a dirty diaper.

“You look fine,” Nancy repeated, and smoothed her own highlighted hair, giving herself an approving look in my mirror. My sister had arrived at the house that morning with Tupperware containers full of various organic and sprouted things. There were soy-cheese quesadillas, goji berries, a pomegranate and a protein shake, plus her very own plates and an aluminum water bottle. “You know about the toxins in plastic,” she’d said, frowning at the sippy cup Spencer was sucking. I’d murmured something about replacing the boys’ cups and plates soon, thinking that on my ever-evolving to-do list, that wouldn’t even make the top hundred.

I went to the kitchen for my car keys and a mug of mint tea. I would have preferred coffee. I hadn’t slept well the night before and was worried about getting drowsy behind the wheel. But as an expectant mother-to-be — I hoped — I knew enough not to show up with coffee on my breath.

“Be good,” I told the boys, who’d been bribed with an extra half hour of Go, Diego, Go! “Listen to Aunt Nancy. She’s the boss while Mommy’s gone. Spencer, did you hear me? Do you understand? And Frank Junior, how about you?” I repeated their names, in part so they’d acknowledge my seriousness, in part to increase the chance of Nancy’s remembering them.

“Just go already,” Nancy ordered as I rifled through my purse. There was my wallet, a tube of lipstick, my Mapquest directions, the list of questions I’d printed out at the library, huddling in front of the printer so that nobody could see what I was doing. I knew the longer I hung around, the more likely it would be that the boys wouldn’t let me leave, so I walked to the car and started driving.

Two hours later I was sitting in the Princeton Fertility Clinic. The clinic director, Leslie, trim and brisk in her suit, had walked me back to a room that must have been specially designed for just this moment, when a prospective surrogate and the woman who’d be paying the bills (buying the baby, I kept thinking, and trying not to think) would first set eyes on each other. The walls were the peach of melting sherbet, and there was a painting of a mother gazing tenderly at an infant in her arms. A love seat was upholstered in a light golden fabric. I gave it a quick pat, then a longer one, enjoying its softness and its lack of stains, wondering how long it would last in my house.

The coffee table was set with a china teapot, a carafe of ice water with translucent circles of lemon floating on the top. Fanned out in a circle on a plate was a ring of Mint Milanos that it was taking all my willpower to avoid. I’d been torn about dieting. On the one hand, maybe infertile women would want their surrogate to look robust and healthy, with broad shoulders and wide hips that evoked peasants in the field, squatting to give birth without missing a swing of their scythes. Then again, rich people hated fat people, maybe because they thought that being fat was the same as being lazy, or they were afraid of becoming fat themselves. I ignored the cookies and checked out the china instead. The sugarbowl and cream pitcher had a lacy blue-on-white pattern, and the spoons and the tongs resting on top of the sugar cubes were probably real silver.

“Just a few minutes,” Leslie had said before closing the door, but it had already been more like fifteen. I wondered why she hadn’t just left me in the waiting room, the one I’d glimpsed online and had walked through on my way back here. I could understand why the women hiring the surrogates, the infertile ones, might not want anyone else to see them, but as for me, I was just there to do a job, same as if I’d been back working at Target, and in the waiting room at least there were magazines.

Target made me think of Gabe, and thinking of Gabe made me remember the bad patch in my marriage, the part I hadn’t mentioned on the forms. For distraction, I eased a single Milano out of its place and slipped it into my mouth, letting the sugary wafer dissolve on my tongue. I was trying to rearrange the circle so it wouldn’t look like any of the cookies were missing. Of course, that was the moment the door swung open and Leslie and a slender, graceful, beautifully dressed woman walked inside.

I got to my feet as Leslie trilled the introductions. “Ms. Croft, this is Anne Barrow. Annie, this is India Croft.”

She was Ms., and I was Annie. So it begins, I thought. For a moment, the two of us stared at each other. India Croft had the look I expected, a rich-lady look (rich bitch look, I thought, before I could stop myself), like one of the women from those Real Housewives of New York episodes I sometimes watched when Frank was working. I knew better than to tune in when he was home. “Bunch of silly people who think they’ve got problems,” he’d grumble, and I couldn’t deny it, or explain to him that sometimes the problems were kind of interesting, and it was at least fun to look at their clothes and their houses, and feel good that your kids weren’t half as bratty as theirs.

India Croft was white, like I’d expected, with smooth, unlined skin. Her heart-shaped face narrowed to a neat little chin. Her lips were full and glossed, her nose was small, adorably tilted, her brows were perfectly shaped, and, beneath them, her eyes were wide, almost startled. That, I figured, was probably the Botox — lots of the Real Housewives had that exact same expression, like someone had just pinched their behinds. Her hair was somewhere between chestnut and copper, with all the shades in between, long and thick and shiny. She wore a pale-lavender cashmere sweater set — at least, I thought it was cashmere, but, not owning any cashmere myself, I was really just guessing — and a crisp skirt, chocolate-brown with a pattern of loops and swirls embroidered in darker-brown thread across it. I would have never thought to put brown and pinkish-purple together, but it was perfect. The contrast between the pastel of the sweater and the rich cocoa of the skirt, the soft cashmere and the crisp linen, was like something I’d see on a mannequin or in a magazine. Her legs were tanned and bare. She wore dark-brown cork-soled espadrilles with ribbons that wrapped around her slim calves. I could smell her perfume, something flowery and sweet, and that, of course, was perfect, too.

Standing there, my mouth full of Mint Milano mush, sweating in my long-sleeved dress, I felt big as a battleship and just as ungainly. I swallowed, ran my tongue over my teeth, and stepped forward, saying the words I’d rehearsed in the car: “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Hello,” she said. She tugged at one lilac cuff, then the other, shaking that gorgeous hair against her back, and I felt the strangest sensation of being seen. . not seen, exactly, but recognized. It felt as if, somehow, she was able to see me standing there in my cheap dress and my not-right purse and know me, everything I was, everything I hoped for: how I wanted to redo my kitchen and build a little office, that I wanted to buy my sons new winter jackets, that I wanted, someday, to go to Paris, and go to college, to have shelves full of books I’d read and understood, to have an important job. I felt like she saw me not just as a mother or wife or person in a Target pinny who knew how to find the Lego sets and the scrubbing pads, but as myself, loving and complicated and angry sometimes.

“Anne. . Barrow, is it?” she said, in a pleasant voice. I pegged her at forty. A pretty forty, a young-looking forty, a forty who probably watched what she ate and worked out every day, but still, forty was forty, and forty was, in my opinion, a little too late to get started with the whole baby-making thing. I wondered why she’d waited, what her story was, and if I’d ever get to hear it.

“Annie,” I told her, and held out my hand.

After thinking it over for a few days, I’d decided to tell my brothers what Kate Klein had found out, thinking they’d be just as alarmed as I was and that one of them would know what to do.

Trey had been with Violet when I’d called — I could hear her babbling in the background — and he’d told me, in between her trips up and down the slide at the neighborhood park, that I shouldn’t rain on my father’s parade. “It’s America. Everyone gets a second act,” he said after I’d given him the most damning portion of India’s dossier. Which left me with Tommy. I had just bought a ticket for his upcoming show, thinking I’d present the evidence in person, when my cell phone rang. The number on the screen was for Kate Klein’s office, but Darren Zucker was the one on the line.

“How are you doing?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I said.

“Busy?”

“Not really.” I’d been looking at Victorian jewelry that morning, gorgeously worked, ornate pieces, necklaces and engagement rings, the kind of thing I’d want for myself — small and special, the opposite of India’s ostentatious rock.

“You sound busy.” Darren himself sounded vaguely insulted. I softened my tone, reminding myself that he was a messenger, albeit a messenger in goofy glasses, and it wasn’t his fault that India was a liar. A thought occurred. “Would you like to go to a concert with me?”

“What, like a date?” Now he sounded surprised.

“As friends,” I said firmly. I wasn’t interested in Darren, with his limp handshake and his hipster affectations. In addition, he knew exactly how much my father was worth and probably how much I was, too, and, while it wasn’t as if this information was some big secret, knowing that Darren had access to specifics made me want to keep him at a distance. I didn’t like him… but I didn’t like the thought of traipsing through Hoboken by myself, either, and all of my friends had put in their time at my brother’s performances.

“You got a man?” he persisted.

“None of your business.”

“Taking that as a no,” he said cheerfully, and, over my protests, told me he’d meet me in front of my apartment at nine o’clock Friday night.

“So what’s the band called again?” he asked as we walked along a sidewalk in Hoboken.

“Dirty Birdy,” I said, keeping an eye out for broken glass and dog excrement. “They were Cöld Söre for a while. With umlauts.”

“But of course,” Darren said.

“But then the bass player left, and they reformed, and now they’re Dirty Birdy.” The band was third on the bill, not scheduled to go on until midnight, which, realistically, could mean much later than that. Darren, who still seemed to be laboring under the misapprehension that this was a date, took my arm as we navigated past a puddle of what looked like vomit. It was nice having him with me, sort of like having our old golden retriever, Mittens, loping along at my side.

I looked at the doorways, then down at my iPhone. “It should be right here. The club-slash-coffee-shop is called Drip, and I checked the address before leaving my apartment.” But there was no sign on the plain red door, no number, nothing to indicate that there was a business behind it.

Darren looked at my screen, then looked at the door. Then he knocked. The door swung open. Smoke and loud voices poured out into the street, and a muscled bouncer held out one tattooed mitt. “Ten dollars,” he said.

Darren peeled off a twenty. “You need a sign,” I told the bouncer, who looked at me like he didn’t understand English. “Seriously,” I said, twisting through the crush of bodies, pulling my earplugs out of my pocket and hoping against hope that there’d be something as pedestrian as a table in the place. Fat chance. There were no tables in sight, just a bar that ran the length of the room, a couch upholstered in hideous paisley sagging against one wall, and a makeshift stage up front.

“What can I get you?” Darren asked.

“Whatever,” I said, trying not to sulk, or yawn. The room was hot and crowded, crammed with people who all seemed to be having more fun than I’d ever had in my life. Girls with glitter on their faces and tattoos on the smalls of their backs swigged from cans of Pabst and Coors, waving their arms in the air and swinging their hips as they spun around in tiny circles.

“Beer?” he asked. “Wine? Sloe gin fizz?”

“Vodka and tonic,” I said. It had been my parents’ summertime drink. In the Hamptons, they’d carried thermoses of V and Ts to the beach. I was ready for the worst, but the drink came in a clean glass, frosty on the outside, with a thick wedge of lime balanced on the rim. I took a sip, watching the girls dancing, trying to decide if they were high.

“Not bad,” Darren said, as Dirty Birdy finally took the stage and launched into their cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” “Is that your brother? He’s really good!”

I nodded, wondering if Darren actually enjoyed this noise, if anyone could. Tommy had a nice voice — he’d sung in choir in school — but all of his sweetness was drowned out by the volume of the pounding drums and the squealing guitars.

Forty minutes later, Tommy bounded off the stage, sweaty and smelling of beer and cigarette smoke. I introduced them, and my brother and Darren exchanged “hey, mans” and handshakes. Then I asked Darren to excuse us and walked Tommy to the bar, where I pulled Kate Klein’s folder out of my purse. “It’s about India,” I hollered into my brother’s ear. Tommy looked inside the folder for a minute, then looked over at the blonde in a ridiculously tiny T-shirt making eyes at him from the corner. After a minute, he sighed and pushed his beer at me. I pushed it right back.

“You know what, Betts?” His voice was raspy after shouting into the microphone. “This is none of our business.”

I drew back as if he’d slapped me. “Of course it’s our business! He’s being used. This woman is taking advantage of him.” My voice trailed off. Tommy patted my shoulder the way he would a puppy’s head. “Let it go,” he whispered in my ear. Then he lifted his head. “Hey, you and Derek want to hang out?”

I glared at him. “His name is Darren. And it is two o’clock in the morning, so no, we do not want to hang out.” He shrugged. I watched him go, standing like I was frozen on the sticky floor of the bar in Hoboken — Hoboken! I’d gone all the way to Hoboken! — before pushing the folder into my bag and stomping out the door in the jeans I’d bought for the occasion. Not that they made any difference. Even my jeans were wrong — too loose, too new, too dark, the wrong cut, the wrong brand, the wrong something.

“Hey, you okay?” Darren asked, following me into the darkness, toward the train that would take us back to the city. I could feel sweat gluing my blouse to the small of my back, where I would never have a tattoo. “Not great,” I’d said.

“Can I help?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Thank you for coming,” I said. We rode home in silence. He escorted me up the subway stairs, bought me a bottle of water at the Korean grocery store on my corner, and walked me to my door.

“If you want to talk about it. .” He looked sweet and hopeful, even cute, if you could ignore the glasses, but all I wanted was to be alone.

“I don’t,” I said. He handed me the water. Then he set his hands on my shoulders. Surprised, I stumbled backward, catching my heel on the curb. I would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding me. . but, of course, if he hadn’t been holding me I wouldn’t have tripped in the first place. Then, just like that, his lips were on mine, warm and gentle, and he’d pulled my body against his so that we were chest to chest, hip to hip. In that instant, I wasn’t hot, wasn’t tired, wasn’t irritated at the way the night had gone or worried about how exhausted I’d be the next day. I wanted to keep kissing him, to have him keep kissing me, even though I’d never approved of couples who kissed on the street. Then, as suddenly as he’d started, he stopped, releasing my shoulders, stepping back onto the sidewalk. “Betsy,” he said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Tina?”

“Family only.”

“Betts?”

“Only if I get to call you Dare.”

He grinned, tipped an imaginary hat, and set off in the direction of the subway, hands in his pockets, whistling.

Upstairs, I got out of my clothes and into the shower and stood there, letting the cool water wash over me. It was almost three in the morning, and I’d met with nothing but frustration as I’d tried to make my family see the absurdity of what my father and India were attempting… but still I fell asleep with a smile.

The following weekend I went to the one person I thought would see the gravity of the situation; I made my first trip ever to my mother’s ashram. I booked a ticket to New Mexico and flew out from LaGuardia on Saturday morning. I rented a car at the airport and followed the GPS’s directions through forty-five miles of blasted-looking desert interrupted by gas stations, the occasional casino, and clusters of Native Americans selling blankets by the side of the road.

The Baba had done well for himself. The parking lot was paved, the grounds of the Enlightenment Center beautifully landscaped, oases of jewel-green grass accented with fountains and manicured beds of flowers. I sat for forty-five minutes on a stone bench in the cool, tiled lobby of a little adobe building that I refused to call a yurt, listening to the tinkling of water into a basin, sipping tea that tasted like boiled twigs, and glaring at a young woman in a white linen caftan who answered the telephone in an annoyingly mellifluous voice. “Love, light, fulfillment,” she would singsong. When I pulled out my iPhone she used the same dopey voice to say that electronic devices were not permitted (“They disrupt your aura”).

Eventually, my mother glided in, dressed in white robes of rough linen, her familiar musky, sandalwood-and-patchouli scent filling the air. I felt my eyes burning, and I looked away, blinking, not wanting to let her see how much I still missed her, how jealous I was of the people who had their mothers there to help them through their twenties. A mother could help you choose and furnish your first apartment; she could listen to however much you chose to tell her about your love life; she could offer a loan or a sympathetic ear or even just a night when you could go back to the place you’d grown up in, sit in the kitchen while she made your favorite meal, and be a child again. All of that had been denied me, thanks to her selfishness, and to the Baba.

I clamped down on my fury as she led me to an empty yoga studio and handed me a buckwheat-filled bolster to perch on, explaining, as she arranged her own body, the importance of opening our hips. I sat cross-legged, awkward in my skirt and heels and sleeveless silk blouse (I’d taken off my jacket and left it in the car). My mother laid a woven Indian blanket over my lap, then looked me over with a tolerant and utterly infuriating smile.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s just that we don’t see many women dressed like you are.”

I looked down at my clothing, my Ferragamo pumps, and didn’t answer, thinking that she used to dress this way, too, that I was just as she’d made me, which gave her no right to judge.

My mother took my hands in hers. “What’s troubling you?” Her voice, once a combination of broad midwestern and New York City lockjaw, had become as syrupy and singsongy as the girl’s behind the counter had been. Her silvery-gray hair, which she’d been wearing in ridiculous Pocahontas braids before she’d left, was clipped short now, almost a buzz cut that exposed the oval shape of her skull and her elfin ears. Her pale-blue eyes looked enormous in her face. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and her skin was freckled and rosy from the sun. There were no earrings in her ears, no rings on her fingers, not a single bracelet or bangle, and she was barefoot underneath her robe, her toenails unpainted, her small feet calloused and tanned.

“Dad was in the hospital. He had a blocked artery. They gave him a stent.”

She sighed. “He has so much stress in his life. He needs to slow down.”

Whatever. “His new wife. . I found out some things about her. Some bad things.”

She nodded again. At least she was looking at me and not at her guru, whose framed portrait beamed down from the front of the room. The Baba had grown his long hair even longer, and was sitting cross-legged, a beatific smile on his face, like a white Jimi Hendrix in a bathrobe.

“They want to have a baby.”

This, finally, got her attention. She cocked her head at a quizzical angle, eyes narrowed, jaw tight. I remembered that expression from when I’d come home to tell her that another girl had stolen my bookbag at lunch, and from the time she’d been ousted as head of the annual diabetes dance (this was the year after she’d insisted that the passed appetizers be vegan). I heard her take a deep breath, inhaling through her nose, before she said, “The Buddha instructs us to welcome new life in the spirit of gladness and joy.”

“Mother.”

“Satya,” she corrected, touching my knee beneath the blanket.

I felt my lips curl. “Satya. They’re paying some woman to donate her egg. They’re paying another woman to carry a baby for them. And this woman, Dad’s new wife, is seriously no good.”

She reached forward, placing her cool hands on mine. “Change is the only constant,” she intoned. “Sorrow is like a leaf in a stream. Sit on the banks. Watch it pass.”

“You may recall,” I said, with some asperity, “offering me slightly different advice before the Barneys sample sale.”

She smiled. Serenely. Indicating her plain robes, she said, “Suffering ends when craving ends,” like this was a message of incredible profundity instead of something her guru had probably cribbed from a Starbucks cup. “I was lost to myself in New York. Now I’ve come home. So what about you, Bettina? What is it you crave? How can you find your way home?”

“I’ve got a ticket on the five-thirty flight to LaGuardia,” I said. It wasn’t like I could tell her that home was forever lost to me, because home was the five of us, together, the way we used to be. Nor did I mention that, hoping against hope, I’d bought a ticket for her, too.

She rose easily to her feet and walked me to another fountain, this one outdoors, a verdigris-green bowl into which water trickled from a sculpted flower. We sat there in silence, smelling sage and some flowers I didn’t recognize. “Be well,” she said. I knew it was a dismissal. She kissed my cheek and glided off to her chores.

It wasn’t until I’d dropped off the rental car and was flying back to New York that I figured out what else I wanted: my father’s safety, his happiness, an assurance that he would not get his heart broken again. These were perfectly reasonable things to desire. Trey was too wrapped up in Violet’s new teeth and soiled diapers to care; Tommy was too busy chasing women who thought it was witty when a man sang a heavy-metal cover of “Sunny Came Home”; my mother had renounced the world entirely; which meant that I would have to keep my father safe. If I did that, maybe I could keep India’s bony, grasping hands off our money… and maybe I could have a chance at the thing I most missed and most wanted: my family back.

The Monday after my trip to New Mexico, I was down in the Crypt, wearing white cotton gloves, working with a Tensor lamp and a magnifying glass and tweezers to determine the value of an antique silver locket that was part of a new lot of jewelry. “These things are precious to me,” the woman who’d brought them in had said. “They were my mother’s.” I’d dug out a reference book, trying to determine the age of the locket and whether the chain was original to the piece, when Darren Zucker called.

“Just checking in,” he said. “How was your trip?”

“Fine,” I said automatically.

“I was wondering what you decided to do.” His voice was high, a little nasal, the voice of a Woody Allen wannabe for whom the whole world was a joke.

“Are you billing me for this?” I asked.

“You have a suspicious and untrusting nature. But I respect that. And no, this isn’t business. I was just curious. It’s how I wound up in this line of work — being curious. And I was thinking you might want someone to talk to. You know, do the Franklin list.”

“Pardon?”

“Ben Franklin. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. List the pros and cons. We could have lunch.”

I closed my book and gently replaced the necklace in its box. Darren Zucker was not my ideal confidant, but he’d been a good sport about our trip to Hoboken, and besides, I did need to eat. There were no windows in the Crypt, but when I’d arrived that morning the weather had been a beautiful day, the sky deep blue, a light breeze stirring the treetops. September in New York City always felt, to me, like the year’s true beginning. It made me think of the last days of summer, loading up the station wagon in Bridgehampton for the ride back to the city. We’d stay in the Hamptons as long as we could, wringing every last minute out of August. My parents would throw a barbecue on Labor Day, inviting anyone who was left: the neighbors, our staff, their kids, the lifeguards who’d watched us swimming all summer long. We’d eat chicken and ribs, potato chips and thick slices of watermelon on paper plates. Games of tag and Marco Polo and hide and seek would form, break up, and re-form, and, as it got late, children would fall asleep all over the house, in beds, on couches, in nests of blankets and pillows on the floor.

As the night went on, the grown-ups would gather on the porch and the lawn, drinking vodka tonics or beers. On that night, instead of their usual jeans and chino shorts and tennis skirts, they’d get dressed up, the men in button-down shirts and jackets, and the women in Lilly Pulitzer skirts or sundresses that left their tanned arms and shoulders bare. Some of them still smoked back then, and I remembered looking at the lit cigarettes bobbing and darting like fireflies, music coming from a CD player plugged in on the porch, the sound of their laughter, and how I would think, This is how I want it to be when I grow up.

Darren and I met at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. Where else, I thought wearily, would a committed hipster take a girl for lunch? He’d already staked out a bench when I arrived and was waving at me, wearing his glasses, khakis, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, checked blue-and-white, which looked like it had been swiped from some homeless man’s closet. I was in my usual office wear, an A-line black cotton skirt, a plum-colored boatneck sweater with three pearl buttons at each sleeve, low-heeled shoes, and a gold necklace. “Chocolate? Vanilla?” Darren asked, holding out two cups. “The line gets crazy, so I bought one of each.” He’d also gotten two cheeseburgers with everything and an order of fries.

He opened the paper sack, and we spread our lunch on our laps. Darren took a big bite of cheeseburger and sighed happily, the way a man with his mouth full of meat will, as I removed the lettuce and tomato from my own burger with my fingertips and set them aside before carefully peeling away the cheese.

“Oh, come on,” he said as I took a small bite. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those rabbit-food girls.”

I didn’t bother to respond. For years, I’d read those “Make the Most of Your Figure!” articles, the ones that told you how to dress if you were a pear or an hourglass or an inverted triangle, and I’d used all the tips they’d recommend to try to balance my narrow shoulders and flat chest with my wide hips and heavy thighs, but I wasn’t sure whether any of it did much good. Nor did dieting help. I’d done the rounds with that in high school, two weeks of grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs, a stint on Weight Watchers sophomore year and another on Jenny Craig when I was a junior. When I started college I’d tried a few of my roommate Vanessa’s diet pills, but all they did was give me a permanent headache and make my mouth feel like it was crammed full of cotton. Each time I’d lose ten or fifteen pounds, but it never changed my essential imbalance, the way that my body looked like one woman’s torso grafted onto another woman’s bottom.

“I think you look fine,” said Darren, eyeing me slowly, up and down. His ridiculous glasses bobbled on his cheeks as he raised his eyebrows. “Nice gams.”

I yanked at my skirt. “Nice gams? What are you, Raymond Chandler?”

“I am a detective,” he said, and poked a straw through the top of a waxed-paper cup, sucking down his chocolate shake with a noise that sounded like a clogged toilet finally managing a flush.

“I just like to eat things one at a time,” I explained.

He looked at my lap, where I’d arrayed the burger, the bun, the cheese, the lettuce, and the tomato, each in its own place on the white waxed paper. “Is that, like, a condition?”

“Habit.” I took another bite of the burger, holding it carefully with the pads of my fingertips.

He wolfed down his own lunch in half a dozen jaw-distending bites while I looked him over. He was a rangy guy with broad shoulders and thick legs, full lips and a cleft chin and a surprisingly dainty nose. Thick eyebrows, light eyes, pale skin, and an unlined brow that made him look boyish, like he didn’t have a care in the world as he reached into a battered canvas satchel at his feet and pulled out a legal pad and a pen. “Okay,” he said, writing PROS and CONS and dividing them with a line slashed down the center of the page. “I’ve got half an hour, but I bet we can solve this by then. Pro?”

“My father is living a lie,” I began. “His wife isn’t what she says she is, and he deserves to know that.”

“And you’re sure he doesn’t know?”

I nodded, because I was positive that if my father had any idea who India really was, he would never have married her. Almost positive. If he had some kind of ridiculous knight-on-a-white-horse fantasy. . but then I dismissed it. There was no way my father could have known what I knew about India and married her anyhow, let alone agreed to have a child with her.

“More pros?” he asked.

“Maybe if he knew the truth, they’d get divorced. Or the marriage would be annulled,” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe my mother would come to her senses.” I said it—putting it out there, as Vanessa, who was a big fan of putting things out there, used to say — even though I knew it was unlikely.

“Is your mom still in the city?” Darren asked.

I shook my head. “She’s. .” This was painful to admit, but Darren was basically a stranger, a stranger who’d been on my payroll, which meant that he was obligated to keep my secrets. Besides, it wasn’t as if we had friends in common. There was no one he could gossip to who’d be interested. “She’s in New Mexico. In an ashram.”

“An ashram?” he repeated. “Whoa. Did she read Eat, Pray, Love?”

“She said she wanted to live authentically.” The last word came out more scornfully than I’d intended. I looked around to see who might have heard, but the other people in the park seemed focused on their food, or on one another.

Darren raised his eyebrows. “You don’t approve?”

I shrugged, feeling foolish, nibbling at a lettuce leaf to buy time. “She sends me pictures of herself in the sweat lodge.”

“Good times.” He grinned. “My mom sends me articles she clips from the newspaper. Like, actually cuts them out with scissors. Recipes, mostly. Those Mark Bittman ones, with six ingredients. You think your dad still loves her? Your mother, not mine.”

“I do,” I said automatically. My parents never fought, never even disagreed until my mother took up with the Baba. Then I thought of my father and India, beaming at me as they’d told me their “wonderful news,” the way he’d tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. I couldn’t remember him ever looking at my mother like that, or touching her so tenderly. My parents had been equals — at least at first. When they’d met, at the University of Michigan, my mother was the one who came from a wealthier, more established family, and she was a year ahead of him in school. Her parents had gone to college; my father’s parents had not. India was different — younger, smaller, more fragile, more in need of a wealthy man’s patronage. Maybe that was what he found appealing.

“And the stepmother?” Darren asked. “What’s she doing that’s so bad?”

“Beg pardon?”

“I mean, did she turn your bedroom into a sex dungeon?”

I smiled — it was a funny thought — and shook my head.

“Steal your boyfriend?” Darren continued. “Run over your dog?”

“She hasn’t done anything to me,” I admitted. I wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. “And I don’t have a dog.”

“Somehow,” said Darren, “that does not surprise me.” He’d finished the first milkshake. He lifted the second one, tilted it toward me, and started drinking almost before I’d finished shaking my head. “Do you think she makes your dad happy?”

“I think,” I said, “that if she does, it’s a happiness that’s illusory and transient.”

He frowned. “Jesus, where’d you go to school?”

“Vassar. And it won’t last,” I said. “A person like that, she’ll get bored. She’ll leave him.”

“And take all his money?” Darren’s voice was innocent enough, but he knew — he had to — that India couldn’t leave with more than a few million of my father’s dollars. Unless this folly they were embarking on came to pass. Unless they had a baby.

“It’s not that,” I said. I was reluctant to say what I really thought, but, again, I reminded myself that Darren was an employee, that he’d keep my confidences. “I’m worried that she’ll hurt him. That she’ll break his heart.”

There it was, out in the open. “Is that what happened with your mother?” Darren asked.

I nodded again. He pointed to the uneaten half of my bun. “Are you going to finish that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

He shrugged, sucked fruitlessly at the milkshake cup, then asked, “There’s no chance she really loves him?”

I started ripping my lettuce into shreds, feeling Darren’s eyes on me, his careful regard. It felt good, I acknowledged, to have a boy look at me like that. “I’m not sure,” I answered, wondering in what universe I was qualified to answer questions about love. I’d never really had a boyfriend. Crushes, yes, dates, yes, kissing and fondling on dormitory beds, somewhat. I’d lost my virginity the week before college ended with a boy who I was pretty sure was gay, not because I loved him, or even particularly liked him, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of receiving my diploma before I’d had sex. I knew that I was a throwback. I knew that I would have been more comfortable in an era of corsets and clear expectations, of good manners and muted voices, where men didn’t hawk phlegm on the street and undress you with their eyes and use fuck and shit like yes and please.

“I don’t know how much I know about love.”

Darren started to sing. “I know. . something about love. Gotta want it bad.” His voice was surprisingly tuneful.

“Are you in a band?”

“I was in a girl group, actually. I sang the high parts.” He shook his head sadly. “Then Curtis started up with Deena, and Effie took it hard.” He hummed a few bars of “And I Am Telling You.”

“That must have been difficult.”

He shrugged. “It’s why I have chosen the stable and well-paying life of a professional investigator, instead of pursuing my passion for doo-wop.”

I folded the remnants of my lunch into the paper sack and wiped my hands again. Darren said, “You know, my folks split up, too. It turned out to be the best thing for them. FYI.” He held out his hand for my trash, tossed it, then came back and picked up his pad and his pen. “If you tell him, what good comes of it?”

“Well, then he’d know. Then he could make an informed decision.”

He scratched the side of his nose. “But he’s already married her. That’s a decision, right?”

“Not an irrevocable one. Marriages can be annulled…”

He shook his head. “That’s mostly for soap operas. In the real world, actually, it’s a lot harder than you’d think.”

“He could get a divorce.”

“True.”

“He could sue her for fraud. He could say she’s misrepresented herself.” Of course, I knew that such a lawsuit would place him even more in danger of being mocked on the Internet than a mere annulment or a simple divorce would have.

“Also true.” He pulled off his ridiculous glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose, then rested his head on the back of the bench, and closed his eyes.

I glared at him. “Are you going to sleep?”

“I am not. I’m enjoying the day. This weather’s great. I grew up in Miami. It never cools off down there.” He stretched his arms up over his head. When they came down, one of them landed around my shoulders. I pulled away, startled. . then shrugged and settled back against him. He was strange, but funny and interesting. I’d known a lot of guys, but not many of them were interesting, and not many of those were interested in me.

“They’re having a baby,” I blurted. “With a surrogate.”

He opened his eyes and pulled his hands back. “Now that,” he said, “would change things.”

“I know that.” My voice was sharp. “Don’t you think I know that? My father’s fifty-seven. Do you think he’s got any business having a baby? He’ll be seventy-five years old when the kid graduates from high school. Almost eighty when it’s done with college.”

“And eighty-two when it gets its master’s degree.”

“It’s wrong. It’s unnatural.”

“It’s technology,” he said, shrugging. “Remember that woman who had eight kids at once?”

I shuddered and said nothing. Darren sat up, put his glasses back on, and flipped to a fresh page of his legal pad.

“Pros? Cons?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him that a baby would mean that our family was irrevocably, irretrievably broken, that there’d be no going back to the way we were. I remembered the smallest things, every happy detail. In the Hamptons, after dinner, my father would pile us into the car for a trip to Carvel. Bring me a small dish of Thinny-Thin, my mother would instruct from the daybed on the screened-in porch, where she spent much of the summer curled up with the tabloid magazines she’d never permit herself in the city. No, wait, just regular vanilla. With a little hot fudge. And maybe some whipped cream. And nuts. Actually, vanilla-chocolate swirl. And see if they’ll throw on some cookie crunchies. I love those cookie crunchies. Tell them it’s for me.

If Darren thought his own parents’ divorce had turned out to be a good thing, there was no way he’d understand how I felt, how badly I missed my parents as a couple, the five of us together, my parents, my brothers, and me.

I looked at my watch and brushed my hands along my skirt to remove any bits of food or lint or pollen. Darren was watching me so closely that I wondered if I had ketchup or mustard on my face, or if my slip was showing. (How Vanessa had howled when I’d unpacked my slips! “You wear these?” she’d asked, pinching one between her thumb and index finger and holding it away from her body like it was going to attack her.)

“You want to get together some time for dinner?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking that maybe this was the one good thing that could come out of all this mess. I liked him. It was a nice surprise.

After work, instead of going home, I took the subway to my father’s office down on Wall Street, taking the elevator up to the thirty-second floor, where he and his assistants worked in glass-walled rooms that had floor-to-ceiling views of the Hudson River. When I was little the office had been smaller, and he’d just had one assistant, who kept a stash of caramel squares in her desk drawer and let me bang on an unplugged keyboard while I waited for my dad. I hadn’t been to his office in years, maybe not since high school, when I’d ridden the elevator flush with triumph, clutching my college acceptance letters. Now my dad’s assistants had assistants. . but he didn’t keep me waiting for nearly as long as my mother had before waving me into his office.

“To what do I owe the privilege?” he asked.

He looked good, better than I’d seen him in years, his skin flushed, his hair recently cut and neatly combed. I thought he’d lost a few pounds — since the scare with his artery, he’d been trying to stick to a low-fat diet. He was on new medication for his cholesterol, plus a bunch of vitamins that India had researched. The last time I’d been over there’d been turkey meatloaf and oven-roasted vegetables instead of the usual roast beef and mashed potatoes, but he’d been a good sport about it, and India had smiled proudly when he’d asked for fat-free yogurt for dessert. She’s good for him, the voice in my head said, and I told it to be quiet. Just because she could make a turkey meatloaf — or, more likely, tell the chef to make one — didn’t mean she wasn’t going to hurt him, or that she had his best interests at heart.

I took a seat opposite my father’s desk and opened my mouth to tell him: Don’t have a baby with this woman. . or maybe just to remind him of the good times we’d had. Dim sum brunches in Chinatown, dinners at Daniel to celebrate each of our high school graduations, heading to the Hamptons on Friday afternoons, the five of us in a helicopter, smiling with anticipation, feeling that swooping sensation in our bellies as the city fell away beneath us.

“Bettina,” he said. “What’s up?” As he sat there looking at me, eyes crinkled at the corners, I noticed a new picture among the familiar shots of the five of us, over the years — Trey with braces, holding a striped bass he’d hooked in Montauk; Tommy with his first guitar; me at my debut, in a white lacy dress that seemed, in retrospect, specially cut to display my bony clavicles, dancing with my father. The new picture sat in a silver frame right next to his oversize computer monitor, and my heart sank when I saw it: him and India, under a canopy of lilies and roses, saying their vows.

“What’s up, hon?”

I couldn’t deny it. He looked happy… happy in a way I hadn’t seen him looking since my mother had left. . and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be the one to tell him that his happiness was based on a lie, or to force him to trade what I wanted — my family, back the way it had been — for what he had. It was over. The odds of a reunion had been slim to begin with, and now, with Satya burbling her coffee-cup wisdom from her ashram and India determined to have a baby, they’d dwindled to none.

“Bettina?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, and tried to smile. “I was in the neighborhood having lunch with a friend, and I haven’t been up here in forever. I thought I’d just say hi.”

The morning I met my surrogate for lunch, I’d woken up in an empty bed. Marcus’s pillow was smooth, the covers untouched. The curtains were open, Central Park visible through the windows, the trees pale green with new leaves. Shimmery early-morning sunlight dappled the walls it had taken me three months to have painted just the right shade of coral: not too orange, not too pink. I wondered if he’d fallen asleep in his office, or the living room, and tapped out a text asking him. Then I got out of bed, pulled on my sports bra, my tank top, my two-hundred-dollar yoga pants and three-hundred-dollar sneakers and went to meet my trainer in the lobby.

Ninety agonizing minutes later, after we’d done sprints and squats and lunges, followed by push-ups and tricep dips against the benches in the park, I took a shower, wrapped my hair in a towel and myself in a robe, and sat at the vanity in my dressing room, in front of the three-way mirror I’d had installed. Because I wasn’t going out that night, I did my makeup myself, smoothing on custom-blended foundation with a fresh wedge of sponge, curling my lashes, blow-drying my hair, then running a flatiron over it, performing each step as automatically as I brushed my teeth. My clothes hung in perfect order in my immense closet, which had specially designed shelves, motorized racks, and cubbies to hold everything from scarves to handbags to suitcases and hats, and padded benches where I could sit to put on my shoes. Dressed, I looked at myself in the full-length antique mirror that stood beside the door. A stranger stared back, a stranger in an eight-hundred-dollar sweater and a nine-hundred-dollar skirt and a cushion-cut diamond insured for six figures.

I remembered the first time that Marcus had taken me home, to the apartment in the San Giacomo. I’d seen the place before, in pictures, when I was conducting my initial research. It had been featured in all of the shelter magazines and photographed for the Times, but it took very little effort to feign complete, jaw-on-my-chest awe when the elevator doors slid open for the first time. It was enormous, of course, gorgeously decorated, every detail perfect, from the silk carpets on the floor to the crown moldings on the ceilings to the art that was mounted and hung on all the walls, and the flowers, ranging from a soaring arrangement of cherry blossoms in the entryway to the simple bouquets next to each of the guest room’s beds. I walked through, admiring, taking care not to stare or let my hands linger too long on any plush or polished surface, asking questions—Where did you find these dishes? Is that a real Degas? — assuming, correctly, that Marcus would be amused—“tickled,” as he’d say — by my interest.

The apartment went on and on, bedrooms flowing into dressing rooms which opened into bathrooms with amenities that even spas didn’t have. There was a Japanese soaking tub made of cedar in Marcus’s bathroom, a steam shower, coils that warmed the marble floors and the towel racks, and an intercom system that let you call down to the kitchen if you should require, for example, some cucumber slices to lay on your eyes or some mineral water to sip while you soaked. I could barely breathe as I followed Marcus on the tour, until finally we stepped out onto the terrace that wrapped around two sides of the building and overlooked the park. “So?” he asked. Maybe I was flattering myself, but I imagined that he looked a little nervous as he waited for my assessment.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, poker-faced. “I just don’t know how you manage in such a small space.” Inside, I was whooping, dancing with glee, with the Jeffersons theme song playing loudly in my head. Movin’ on up. Yes, I was.

The deluxe apartment in the sky came with staff: maids and a cook and a tall, silent, broad-chested man named Paul who introduced himself as the majordomo. His actual job, Marcus explained, was to serve as a combination butler and bodyguard. “He’s got a gun?” I’d asked. “Look,” Marcus said, squeezing my shoulder. “There’s a lot here to protect. You can never be too careful.” Paul scared me. . but I hardly ever saw him. His quarters, along with the maid’s and the cook’s, were on the lower floor, where I rarely went. I stayed upstairs, where I had my dressing room, my office, a walk-in closet that was easily twice the size of my old apartment, and a butler’s pantry, with its own refrigerator and sink and two-burner stove and coffeemaker.

The cook and his assistants were just for me and Marcus, and for his children, who came to dinner once a week and always wanted the same thing — grilled steaks and baked or mashed potatoes, served with some kind of green vegetable that they’d move around their plates without actually eating. When we entertained, whether it was dinner for eight or cocktails for twenty or a holiday party for two hundred of Marcus’s employees, we’d hire a caterer, and a half-dozen cooks plus uniformed waitresses and bartenders would take over the kitchen, preparing all manner of delicacies, little bites and sips of things, shot glasses of sherry-topped cream of mushroom soup, spoonfuls of risotto, bacon-stuffed dates, and curried shrimp on skewers. They’d leave every dish and countertop spotless at the end of the night. I had no idea how much any of this cost. Since my marriage, I’d never seen, much less paid, a bill.

I was a rich lady with a part-time job, a job I kept just to have something to get me out of the house each day. I had the life I’d always wanted, with all the trappings and the trimmings: the personal trainer who charged two hundred dollars an hour to hold a stopwatch while I ran, the hairdresser and makeup artist, similarly paid, who would come at any hour of the day or night. I had a car and driver — I’d send a text, and ten minutes later I’d walk out the front door, and there’d be a Town Car idling by the curb. I could buy whatever I wanted — art, clothes, jewels, a car of my own to join the half dozen that Marcus kept in a garage uptown. What I was learning was that having felt, sometimes, less satisfying than wanting… that dreaming of all this luxury was somehow better than actually possessing it, because once you had it, it could all be taken away.

Another troubling development was that at some point, I’d actually fallen in love with my husband. I hadn’t planned on that happening; had, in fact, suspected that I no longer had the capacity to love anyone at all. But there it was. I’d wake up some mornings while he was still asleep, curled on his side in the plain white T-shirt and white boxer shorts he wore to bed, and I’d be overwhelmed with a wave of tenderness so strong it made me dizzy. I wanted to protect him, to tuck myself in his pocket and go with him when he traveled, smoothing his way, cuddling up with him at night.

I loved feeling his hand on my arm, guiding me into or out of the backseat of a car. I liked his company at dinner, the nights he was home or the times we went out. I could talk to him, joke with him. . and if he was a little in love with the sound of his own voice, if he was already starting to acquire an old man’s smell, if his balls, which I tried to avoid looking at or touching, drooped against his pale, hairy thighs, well, there were worse things in the world. Marcus was reliable, one hundred percent. He remembered everything I’d ever told him about myself, every detail about my family that I’d shared. If he said he was going to be somewhere or do something, he kept his word. If I told him I wanted something, an art book or theater tickets or a baby, he would do whatever it took to see that I got it.

Dr. Dreiser had sent me to the Princeton Fertility Clinic, after I’d declined a fourth round of in vitro. He’d been the one to steer us toward donor eggs — those, plus a gestational carrier, would give us the best chance for success, addressing all my failings: my iffy eggs, my unreliable uterus. I’d gone to the clinic’s website, clicked through the links, filled out the forms, sent in a check, and picked out one of their “carefully screened eggs from donors who meet our high standards of health, medical history, and intelligence.” It sounded a lot like eugenics. Then again, who’d want eggs from someone who wasn’t healthy, or intelligent and gorgeous? The website said nothing about the egg donors’ looks, but I could fill in that blank and assume they were all beauties. Picking the egg donor was easy: I went for tall, blond, smart, and healthy, the way any man would have done. And as soon as I’d met Annie, I’d known she was the one to carry the baby. I hadn’t planned on choosing someone so young, but there was something I recognized in her expression, a hopefulness and a determination to make something better of her life. She reminded me of me, when I’d been young, and her life, as best as I could tell from the forms she’d filled out and the stories she’d told me, could have been my life, if things had gone just a little bit differently.

Annie was perfect. I’d asked for a gestational surrogate who lived in Pennsylvania, the clinic’s state of choice, where the laws were clear. There’d be no legal wrangling over who the baby belonged with, whose name went on the birth certificate under “parents.” I’d requested a woman within a two-hour drive, in her twenties, and Annie was twenty-four and lived outside of Philadelphia, an easy commute to the city. She’d have had kids already, I knew: the clinic insisted on it. She was married — the clinic didn’t insist on that; couldn’t, legally, but Leslie had mentioned that most of their surrogates were in “stable family arrangements,” which, in Annie’s case meant a husband who’d been in the army and still had army benefits. The two of them and their two boys weren’t rich, but they weren’t destitute — the money she’d earn would make a difference, but it wasn’t as if they were living in poverty. From the pictures she’d shown me, I thought their farmhouse looked charming. . and Annie, so far, was earnest and sweet and surprisingly funny sometimes.

We were meeting for lunch at the restaurant on the seventh floor of Bergdorf’s, one of my favorite places, a gorgeous little jewel box of a room that felt like a secret and served delicious salads. Annie was waiting on the first floor, by the display of purses. I stood by the doors and watched her, unseen, as she shyly fingered a silk Valentino bag made of fabric flowers in shades of scarlet and plum. I felt a stab of guilt as I noticed her clothes, sneakers and leggings and a loose-fitting tunic-style top that most assuredly had not come from Bergdorf’s. Why had I brought her here? Was I showing off, trying to prove who had the upper hand, letting her know that she might be carrying the baby but I was the one with the cash?

I tapped her on the shoulder. She set the bag on the glass counter and spun around, looking guilty.

“Oh, India! Hi!”

I gave her a hug. “Pretty bag.”

She lowered her voice. “It costs twenty-one hundred dollars. Two thousand dollars for a purse!”

I didn’t answer. The truth was, I had that very purse in my closet at home, along with its patent-leather cousin and a wallet that matched. “Are you hungry?”

“Oh, my God. Always.”

We took the elevator up to the restaurant, where the maître d’ whisked us to a table by the windows. Central Park spread out on one side, and we could see Fifth Avenue on the other. I ordered my usual salade niçoise, and Annie, looking embarrassed again, asked for the filet and mashed potatoes, an item that was probably on the menu just for the husbands and boyfriends who got dragged along on their wives’ shopping excursions.

“Are you feeling good?” I asked her. I’d wanted a glass of wine with lunch, but it seemed cruel to order one, to drink when she couldn’t, to emphasize once again that she was doing a task I’d hired her to perform.

“I feel great,” she said, buttering a piece of bread (normally, I would have waved the bread basket away, but Annie had looked so happy when it arrived that I hadn’t said a word, and had even made a mental note to order dessert so that she wouldn’t feel uncomfortable if she wanted something). “I told you, I’m good at this.” She tore off a bite of bread. “Some skill, right?”

“I’m sure you have other talents.” From what I’d heard, Annie’s life sounded fun and full. She was close to both her mother and her sister, and sounded genuinely content when she talked about her garden, her sons, her plans for the farmhouse. I felt good that the money she’d be getting would help her realize some of her dreams.

The waiter set our plates down with a flourish, and I watched Annie as she ate. She wasn’t fat, but she was too big to fit into a sample size, which meant she was too big, period, for New York. Clearly she didn’t care for fashion, because, as I’d learned in Los Angeles, even on a budget, you could have a look. Annie had no look. To her, I guessed, clothing was something that existed strictly to keep her from being naked. Her tunic was a shapeless sack in drab purple. Her no-style hair, a pretty light brown, was brushed back from her face and secured with a headband. I could tell she’d made an effort with lipstick and eyeliner and mascara, insofar as “effort” meant putting them on. The eyeliner was smudged a little, and there was a faint track of mascara underneath one eye. The first time I’d seen her, I’d guessed that she didn’t paint her face between one Sunday and another. There was a small diamond ring and a slim gold band on her left ring finger, a cheap-looking watch on her right wrist, plain gold hoops in her ears, and a black leather purse that probably hadn’t cost a fraction of the bag she’d been eyeing downstairs.

I wondered about her finances. She’d been so eager to agree to everything I’d suggested: the organic foods and doctor’s visits and using my obstetrician, a lovely man with gentle hands who was rumored to be generous with the painkillers after a C-section and whose office was just down the block from Elizabeth Arden so you could go get waxed before your appointments. How did they manage on just her husband’s salary? Were they managing? Was she more poor that I’d been led to believe?

Annie pushed her empty plate away, looking embarrassed again. “That was great. Thank you so much.” She looked at me, her cheeks rosy, eyes clear. It was true, I thought, what they said about pregnant women. Annie was glowing. “Do you have time to look around a little when we’re done? Did you see the china on our way in here?”

“Are you in the market?”

“For that? No. But I like the way they’re set up. It’s like a museum.”

“Sure,” I said, thinking again how much I liked her. She was friendly and nervous and eager to please; not dumb, even if she had only a high-school degree and was completely lacking in fashion sense. I wanted to show her things: the rooms that Kelly Wearstler had designed to display the store’s wares, the shabby-chic cracked leather couches and how they set off the delicate Limoges china. I could take her for tea at the Pierre, where I took my assistant every December, as a holiday treat; I could even bring her to see the apartment, put up her feet and take in the view.

“How are the boys?” I asked, after I’d ordered fruit and she’d asked for apple cobbler. When she reached into her purse for her phone pictures I knew she’d have, I saw a sippy cup, the box for a Dan Zanes CD, a wallet bulging with change and receipts, and I recognized her, the way it felt like that performance artist had once recognized me, like I could see who she really was; everything she wanted, everything she dreamed of. At that moment I felt like I could be a sort of fairy godmother, not just an employer but a friend. I could make her dreams come true the way I’d wanted someone to make my own dreams come true. . the way I’d wanted my mother to come back, to take me out of that cold and cheerless house in Toledo and take me to California, land of golden sand and lemon trees and men who’d play their guitars on the beach.

Annie looked startled when I reached across the table and squeezed her hand, but she squeezed back gamely, smiling at me. “You must be so excited,” she said. “This must feel like it’s taking forever.”

“I can wait,” I told her. I’d waited for love, I’d waited for Marcus, and I could wait until May for the arrival of the baby who would serve as living, breathing, evidence of our love; the baby who would make us complete.

A fact I have learned as I’ve moved further away from childhood: if the telephone rings before seven a.m., it’s never good news.

In the predawn gray on a Thursday morning in October, the buzzing of my BlackBerry jolted me awake. Rajit, I thought, rolling over with my eyes still shut. I’d been in the office until eleven the night before, working on the common stock comparison for a footwear factory that one of our clients in Kansas was planning to acquire, and rather than bothering Kimmie, who went to bed at ten, I spent a rare night at home. Rajit had probably forgotten his passwords again (after being up all night doing cocaine, I suspected) and was calling me to get them.

I saw a Pittsburgh area code — not Rajit, then — and pressed the button that would connect the call. “Hello?”

I half expected I’d hear my father’s voice, but instead, there was a stranger on the other end of the line, a woman who sounded young and unsure of herself. “Is this Julia Strauss?”

I sat up, my mouth suddenly dry and my heart beating too loudly. “Yes.”

“This is Sergeant Potts with the Pittsburgh Police Department.” I knew then, before she had to say another word. “Your mother gave me your contact information. I’m calling about your father. I’m afraid I have bad news.”

“Is he…” I swallowed hard, my throat clicking. “Is he in trouble? Did he get arrested? Does he need…”

“We got a nine-one-one call this morning, just after five a.m. Your father’s girlfriend had found him unresponsive. The para-medics made attempts to resuscitate him, but…”

But.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you,” said Sergeant Potts, “your father is dead.”

I closed my eyes, holding perfectly still, like maybe if I didn’t move I could unhear what I’d just heard. Outside my door, my roommates were stirring around me, getting ready to start a normal day, Amanda plodding into the kitchen to make coffee, Wendy flushing the toilet and turning on the shower. “Ma’am?” the police officer said.

“How did it happen?”

“The investigation isn’t complete,” she said. “We’re still talking to people. Gathering evidence.”

“Were there drugs involved?”

Sergeant Potts paused.

“My dad was in rehab this summer,” I said. “He was in a halfway house for six weeks after that. He was going to meetings. I thought. .” My voice caught in my throat. I thought he’d get clean. I thought he’d be grateful. I thought my sacrifice would have meant something.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Yeah, I’m sorry, too.”

I left Rajit a message, telling him there’d been a death in my family and that I’d need the rest of the week off. I pulled my laptop out from under the bed, turned my back to the door, and called my mother. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, no.” I could picture her, in her blue robe, her hair in a ponytail, coffee mug in her hand, pitying me and Greg, of course, but maybe feeling relieved, too, glad that this was over, that he wouldn’t be in the newspapers again, that he wouldn’t embarrass us anymore.

“Sweetheart, there’s nothing more you could have done,” she said. “I hope you know that.”

But it hadn’t mattered. Nothing I’d done had mattered. I bit back my tears. I had arrangements to make, plane tickets to book, a funeral to plan. “Do you know anything about what he’d want?” I asked.

She sighed. “Probably the veterans’ cemetery. That was what he always said.”

I told her I’d call her once I’d bought my ticket. She said she loved me and that she’d see me soon. Then, because I couldn’t think of what else to do, I went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. “Jules, you’re gonna be late!” Amanda sang toward the door. Amanda was an actress, which meant, these days, that she was mostly a caterer.

“I think I’m sick,” I said. My voice was convincingly froggy, which would spare me the trouble of telling them what had happened. I’d have to do it eventually, have to endure their sympathy and come up with some story about my father’s death, but not yet. I made sure the door was locked, picked up my phone, and called Kimmie.

“Hey!” I could hear noise around her. She was in the subway station, I figured. On her way to the lab, with her backpack bouncing on her narrow shoulders, sneakers neatly laced. Something inside of me shifted, and I felt almost faint with longing. I wanted so badly for her to be with me.

“Hey!” came Kimmie’s voice again, bright and almost jubilant. “Jules, is that you, or are you pocket-dialing?”

“It’s me,” I managed. One tear rolled down my cheek and plopped onto my shirt, leaving a damp circle. “My father died.”

“Oh,” Kimmie said. “Hang on. I’ll be right there.”

I packed up my makeup bag, my toothbrush, my comb. From my free-standing wardrobe, I extracted a black skirt and gray blouse, an outfit that always made Rajit, wit that he was, tell me I looked like I was on my way to a funeral. Black pumps, a bra, and a few pairs of panties. I had other stuff, sweatpants and Tshirts and pajamas, at my mother’s place.

My BlackBerry lay on my rumpled bedspread, blinking, probably already filling up with messages from work. I ignored it, pulling on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, yanking on socks and my running shoes and shoving everything into a duffel bag.

Forty minutes later Kimmie was at the door, with a to-go cup and a cinnamon roll in wax paper. She shooed me into the kitchen, which was blessedly roommate-free, and handed me the cup. “What can I do?” she asked. “How can I help?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I was collapsed at the table for two wedged into what the real-estate agent had optimistically referred to as a “breakfast nook.” Part of me had known this day would come… but, even so, I’d done very little to prepare for it. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve never done this before.”

“Drink,” said Kimmie. I took a sip from the cup. The tea was hot and strong, laced with sugar. “Where’s Dad now?” she asked.

“Huh?” For a second, I’d thought she was talking about her father, not mine. I tried to remember whether I knew, finally shaking my head. “I’m not sure.”

“You got that police officer’s number?”

I hadn’t written down the number, but it showed up on my BlackBerry. Kimmie hit “redial” and lifted the phone to her ear. “Yes,” she said, in a crisp voice, one I recognized from the admissions office, when she’d take parents’ phone calls. “May I speak to Sergeant Potts, please?” She waited, then said, “Hello, I’m a friend of Julia Strauss. We’re on our way back to Pittsburgh, and I need to know. .” She paused, then nodded. Scritch-scratch went her pen. “Mmm-hmm. Yes. I see. And how long will that take?” More writing. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to live in my head right now, which insisted on serving up a slide show of my father, cold and stiff and dead on the shag carpet of that crappy apartment. . and of a child with my face, a child that would be half mine, a little boy or little girl I would never know. The price I’d paid. The sacrifice I’d made for nothing.

“Can you give me that number?” Kimmie was asking. “Should I have the funeral director get in touch?” I watched her, wondering, dimly, how she knew how to do all of this. Who had she buried? I’d have to ask.

She hung up the phone and set it, facedown, in the middle of the table. “They took his body to the medical examiner’s office. There’s going to be an autopsy, because it was. .” She paused, looking flustered for the first time, glancing at her notes. “Because he didn’t die in a hospital, I guess, so there wasn’t a doctor there. That’s what they have to do.”

“He overdosed.” My voice was flat. Kimmie got up from the table and stood behind me, one hand resting lightly on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly.

“Can you. .” My voice was almost inaudible. I could barely get the words out. “Will you come with me?”

She answered instantly, as if nothing else were even possible. “Of course I will,” she said.

• • •

Kimmie gave me the window seat on the plane. I leaned the top of my head against the glass and stared out at the sky. All through the ride, she kept giving me things — a novel, a honey-nut granola bar, a bottle of water, tissues. I read, or tried to; I ate and drank what she gave me; I cried, wiping my eyes with my sleeve; and every once in a while I’d manage to tell her something about my dad: how he’d taken me horseback riding once after I’d seen International Velvet on TV, how proud he’d been when I’d gotten into Princeton. Kimmie listened quietly, nodding. “You must have loved him very much,” she said. For a while, when no one was looking, she held my hand.

It was getting dark when we landed in Pittsburgh. My mother picked us up, her eyes red, her hair still frizzy, tucked into its morning ponytail. “There’s soup and frozen pizza if you’re hungry, and, Jules, I put the air mattress in your room, and there’s fresh sheets…”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Did Greg get in touch?” my mother asked.

“He texted.” My brother had, indeed, sent a message consisting of two words: NOT SURPRISED. For Greg, our father had died a long time ago… probably the night he’d stolen Greg’s prized possession, a baseball signed by Reggie Jackson, and sold it. Since then Greg seemed to have decided, maybe unconsciously, that the easiest thing for him to do was to simply hate our father, to forget that, once, he’d been a good dad.

“I’m glad you’ve got such a good friend,” my mother whispered after Kimmie carried our bags up the stairs, slipping quietly out of the room to give the two of us time together. I didn’t answer, didn’t even think to wonder if she suspected Kimmie was more than that.

Upstairs, Kimmie and I took turns in the shower, then had a funny little fight about which one of us should take the air mattress. Finally, I lay down on my bed and Kimmie lay down beside me, fitting her body against mine. I buried my face in the silken net of her hair, and that was how I slept.

The next morning, my mother drove us to the Hoffman Funeral Home, then sat outside waiting in her car. “I could come in,” she’d offered, her voice tentative, and I told her what she expected to hear: “Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

The office floor was thickly carpeted; the chairs were plush and padded. There was a pitcher of ice water on the sideboard, a metal urn of coffee, and a pair of cut-glass decanters, one with amber liquid, the other with something clear.

Monday morning, I told the Hoffman who was helping us, a middle-aged, round-faced man who wore a sober gray suit and a small, sympathetic smile. I told him I would bring clothes for my dad to wear, that the coffin would be closed, that my mother should get the flag that would drape the coffin, and I’d get the bullet casings from the gun salute. (“As a remembrance,” Mr. Hoffman said, and I’d nodded, wondering briefly what I was supposed to do with spent shell casings. Put them in a candy dish? String them on a length of silk thread and wear them as a necklace? Offer them to Rita, who I’d have to deal with soon?)

There was a display room, where I picked out a simple coffin — it was one of the least expensive, and still more than two thousand dollars. “Now, what were you thinking in terms of a service?”

“Small,” I said. “Just the family.”

“And will you be writing an obituary? We can help with that if you…”

“No obituary.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. The air in the room felt thick and unwholesome. The newspapers had already had enough to say about my dad, after the car accident, after his trial. Maybe they’d use the official notice of his death to dredge up the old stories, and write a piece about the disgraced schoolteacher’s unsavory demise. For all I knew, the shame could have been part of what killed him. My dad could have literally died of embarrassment.

Mr. Hoffman touched my arm. “Are you all right? Why don’t we sit down?” Kimmie poured me a glass of water, and I gulped it gratefully.

“Now. How many copies of the death certificate will you require?”

I looked at Kimmie, who shrugged. “I don’t know. What do I need them for?”

“Your father was a teacher, right?”

I nodded, not bothering to correct him, to explain that my father hadn’t been a teacher for years, that for years he hadn’t been anything but a junkie and a drunk.

“So he’ll have a checking account, a savings account. Investments. Cars and a house in his name. .” I let him talk, not bothering to correct him as he listed the things that a man of my father’s age and station should have had. We agreed on twenty copies, I wrote him a check, shook his hand, and told him I’d see him at the cemetery.

My mother was waiting in the parking lot, with her cup of black coffee and a book on tape. “Greg called,” she said. The Camry started with an unpleasant grinding sound. I wondered how long it would run and if she’d have enough money to replace it, and whether I’d be able to help. “He’s not going to be able to make it.”

I nodded, unsurprised. Kimmie, meanwhile, was unzipping her backpack. “You hungry?”

I shook my head. Food sounded like a rumor from a distant planet. I couldn’t imagine ever being hungry again.

“Here,” she said, pulling out a granola bar and passing it to me. “Eat.”

I took a bite and chewed lethargically. Behind the wheel, my mother’s face was pale, her eyes circled with purplish half moons. “Can we stop here, please?” Kimmie asked from the backseat when we drove past a supermarket. She trotted inside and came out with a bouquet of flowers, white daisies and pink carnations wrapped in plastic.

We dropped my mother off at her beauty parlor and drove to the apartment building where my father had lived and died. I pressed the doorbell and we stood there, waiting. A pair of women talking in Spanish came out, followed by a grim-faced teenage boy in drooping jeans and a hoodie. MOVE-IN SPECIAL, announced a sagging banner hanging from the fence along the street.

Rita Devine hurried down the hallway. “Come in, come in. My God, I can’t believe it!” she said, in her thick Pittsburgh accent, the kind that would turn the home team from the Steelers into the Stillers and employed yinz as the plural of you. Her eyes darted from me to Kimmie and back again. “Yesterday there was a dead body on my bathroom floor!”

Bathroom, I thought, feeling my body register the news. The lady cop hadn’t mentioned that my father had died in the bathroom. Add one more part to the inglorious sum, this tawdry bad joke of a death. Of course he’d die in the bathroom. His life had turned into a punch line; why shouldn’t his death be one, too?

The apartment smelled cloyingly of air freshener and, underneath it, that strange, acrid odor I’d smelled before on my father’s clothing. Standing in the entryway, I could see the living room, still a mess, filled with jumbled piles and clusters of things — folded-over newspapers with half-completed Sudoku puzzles, soda cans, coffee cups, rolls of paper towels, magnifying glasses. I picked one of them up and peered through it, watching dust motes falling through a shaft of light.

“Your dad’s eyes got so bad.” Rita was wringing her hands. She was a short, chunky woman with a chipmunky face and two inches of gray showing at the roots of her hair, with thick thighs and breasts that slumped against her belly. My father’s ladylove, in high-waisted jeans and bright-green plastic Crocs.

“What happened?”

More hand-wringing. “Can I bring you gals some coffee?”

“We’re fine,” I said, the same instant that Kimmie said, “Yes, please.” Five minutes later, we each had a cup of microwaved brew, and Rita was perched at the edge of a plastic-slipcovered armchair while Kimmie and I sat on the sofa facing her.

She plucked the teabag out of her mug, realized there was nowhere to put it, and dunked it back in. “You know your dad had been really sick.” Rilly sick.

“I know my father was a drug addict.” I was done with euphemisms, done with pretending. Maybe it comforted her to think that my father had a disease instead of a weakness, but it wouldn’t comfort me anymore.

She pressed her fingers to her lips. “He fought so hard against it. So hard.”

“Just tell me,” I said. “Just tell me what happened.”

“Please,” said Kimmie.

The woman sighed and pressed her hands together. “He came back here when he finished with that place,” she began. That place was probably the sober-living house. I nodded, wondering what it was like to leave a group-living home where there were schedules and counselors and mandatory AA meetings, and then come back here, with Rita, where he’d done so much drinking and drugging. Maybe I should have made other arrangements, found another place for him to go, rented an apartment…

Kimmie touched my forearm. I forced myself to stop thinking about it. Hindsight wouldn’t fix things. He was dead now, and what I had to do was get through the funeral and clean up the mess he’d undoubtedly left behind.

“For a while he was doing okay,” Rita continued. “He’d go for walks, or to the library. He’d go to the gym, pedal that sit-down bike they have. He’d have dinner waiting when I came home from work. Simple things,” said Rita. “Chicken patties, or hamburgs. Spaghetti. Like that.” I nodded, remembering his sad attempts at omelets when I’d come for breakfast.

“The night it happened. .” She pulled in a long breath. “I went to bed at about ten, that’s what I do, because I work, you know, I need to be up real early.” I nodded. “At two or so I heard him up, rustling around. .” She gulped. “And then when I got up, I found him there, on the bathroom floor. His head. . his head was. .” More gulping followed, and a single spastic gesture with her hand. I’d find out later what she hadn’t been able to tell me, from the police photographs and the autopsy report, that my dad had died with his head in the toilet and a crack pipe in his hand. It was a detail, in all honesty, that I could have gone to my own death without knowing.

I kept my eyes on my lap, the throbbing pressure of tears filling my head. It was what I’d expected, but still, hearing it like this, out loud, in this tacky little apartment, made it real. Rill. Kimmie took my hand. I wondered what she made of all this, how far away it was from her own life, her own diligent, hard-working parents. All I wanted was to get out of this place, to breathe the fresh air, to get back on the plane that would take me home and have all of this be someone else’s problem, someone else’s mess.

“I’m so sorry, Julia.” My name sounded strange in her mouth. I hadn’t been Julia since high school. But my father had called me Julia, and Julia was what I’d been when he’d discussed me with this woman. “He tried so hard. He fought it. He really did.”

I got up before she could continue. “Thank you,” I said. What did I mean by that? Thank you for taking him in? Thank you for letting him stay? Thank you for giving him a place to die, so he didn’t have to do it on the street? “The funeral’s Monday morning, in the veterans’ cemetery,” I said. “You’re welcome to come.”

When she hugged me, I could feel her soft body against mine, and I smelled her scent of stale coffee and cigarettes almost overcoming that strange chemical odor that I thought was probably eau de crack. When she pulled away she was crying, and talking fast, words tumbling over one another, her accent growing ever thicker. “I would have done anything for him. You don’t know what it’s been like. What I went through. All those years. I had a house when all this started.” She gestured at the sad little room, the cheap furniture, the piles of crap that my fingers itched to scoop into a trash bag. “A house that was paid for, a car, a 401(k), my savings, my retirement account…”

He’d smoked it all, I thought to myself. Smoked it all up. Now she was practically yelling, her hands balled into fists on the hips of her jeans, an indignant fireplug in green clown shoes. “I did the best I could. The very best I could.”

“I believe you.” I was so tired. I’d never been so exhausted in my life. All I wanted to do was be in a bed somewhere, shoes kicked off, covers pulled up to my chin. “I know you tried to help him, and it must have been very hard.” She closed her mouth, her face sagging. “Thank you,” I said, and managed to sound like I meant it.

• • •

Kimmie walked me away from the apartment building, through the fence, past the banner flapping in the wind, across the street to a park, where we sat under a tree whose leaves were tipped with gold. Fall was here. Winter was coming. I shut my eyes, imagining my life in New York City — the job I despised, the apartment that was still almost more than I could afford, the shower stall so small that the plastic shower curtain stuck to my skin if I didn’t position myself perfectly, the dirt and grit and noise. I considered the men on the subways who’d use a crowded car as an excuse to cop a quick handful of ass, and Rajit, who’d once thrown a cup of coffee at me when it was too cold. (“Keep a change of clothes,” one of his former junior analysts had told me, opening the bottom drawer of her desk to show me a skirt and top, still in dry cleaner’s plastic, that she’d learned to stow there after he’d thrown a salad, with blue cheese dressing, at her.)

I drove us back to my mother’s salon. “How was it?” my mom asked, hugging me, and I told her it went fine, knowing that she didn’t want to hear the details. Kimmie and I caught a bus home, to the neighborhood of neat little ranch houses where I’d grown up. I flipped on the television set, heated soup, buttered toast, found juice glasses, plates, and napkins, moving around like my body was made of cotton. Once, my first year at Princeton, someone had posted a picture of me, taken when I wasn’t looking, online, on a website that rated the looks of all the women in our class. I’d been furious and ashamed. My roommates hadn’t sympathized. “Jesus,” one of them had said when she thought I was sleeping, “it’s not like he said she was ugly. Or fat. It’s a compliment.” Indeed, my inbox had pinged steadily for a week, with guys emailing to introduce themselves and ask if I wanted to get together for a cup of coffee or a movie or lunch. I hadn’t been able to explain how it made me feel invaded and diminished, like there was this thing out in the world, this thing with my name and my face and a great stupid hank of blond hair, this thing that looked like me but wasn’t.

Sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, surrounded by everything I remembered — the square in front of the sink where the linoleum had worn thin, the placemats my father had bought for me and Greg at the children’s museum, the postcard of Barcelona that had been taped on the refrigerator for years — I felt that same sensation, of being there and not there, of not really being myself. I watched Kimmie. She had pulled her hair into a high ponytail, spooned her soup, and chattered to me about New York — a restaurant that made what was supposed to be the best fried chicken in the world; a musical, all in Spanish, where they gave student discounts on Wednesday nights. We washed the dishes, then I took a shower, letting the water flow over me, telling myself what to do next. Pick up the soap. Wash your legs. Under your arms. Now the shampoo.

Kimmie was waiting in the bedroom, in her men’s boxer shorts and ribbed sleeveless undershirt, curled up on the bed. “Do you need anything?” she asked me.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, and lay beside her in the darkness, perfectly still, thinking about who I was: a college graduate, a junior analyst, an egg donor, a woman without a father. “He used to braid my hair,” I whispered, unsure of whether I was talking to myself or to Kimmie; unsure whether she was even awake. But oh, I remembered it, every detail: sitting on the floor in front of his recliner in my favorite loose flannel pajamas, his brown lace-up shoes on either side of me, his hand moving the comb against my scalp, his calm voice asking, What color ponytail holders? One braid or two?

A noise came out of me, something between a moan and a sob, a sound I’d never made before, could not imagine making. It wasn’t loud, and I quickly buried my face in the pillow, but Kimmie must have heard me. She pressed her body tightly against mine. I pulled her head close to me and buried my face between her neck and her shoulder, pressing against the softness of her skin.

Before I left Target for the last time, Gabe gave me a reading list. Most of the books I found at the library and started but didn’t finish, but there was one that held my attention. It was called Never Let Me Go. It was set in England, at a boarding school, and it started off slowly, the way so many of Gabe’s books seemed to begin. At first I thought that it would be about rich kids in the countryside, their fads and cliques and crushes, and two girls falling for the same boy. But gradually, the book shed its disguise and showed its true self to me, and it wasn’t a kids-in-school book at all. It was a horror story. The students at the boarding school weren’t real people; they were clones who had been bred so they could donate their organs. When they “completed”—when they made all the donations they could — they would die.

Once I realized this, I thought the book would turn into a thriller, where the girl, Kathy H., and the boy, Tommy, would try to run away and be together. The clones looked exactly like regular people; there was nothing that distinguished them from anyone else. But that didn’t happen. The two of them simply accepted what they were, what they’d been made for, their destiny. They never tried to fight it, never tried to run. I finished the book feeling sorrow mixed with recognition, thinking, That’s Frank. That’s me.

Frank and I met at George Washington High School in Somerton in Northeast Philadelphia, the winter of our junior year. We’d been in the same schools since seventh grade, but we weren’t in the same crowd. I played flute in the school band and took the academic-track classes — not the honors courses, for the college-bound smarties like Nancy, but the classes for the kids for whom community college or an associate’s degree was at least a possibility.

Frank was on the vocational track, for the kids who were going to work as auto mechanics or licensed practical nurses, delivering the mail or reading the meters or mopping the floors. I knew his name, in the way that all of us in our class of just over two hundred knew one another’s names, but I didn’t know much about him. I’d noticed him because there weren’t that many black kids in our high school, and because he was so cute, with green eyes and close-cropped hair and his skin, medium brown and perfectly smooth, and his lips.

One winter day I’d been sitting in the cafeteria at my usual table with my friends, picking at the shredded cheese on my salad (I was dieting, the way I had through most of high school), when Frank walked over to our table. My girlfriends stared. Most of the shop boys, black and white, wore jeans that hung off their butts, exposing as much of their boxers as they could get away with, and heavy workboots and Tshirts advertising some band or another. Frank had the boots but was dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, neatly pressed, the sleeves rolled up to show his corded forearms. As he came close, I could smell soap and motor oil (he’d been working in the school’s garages that morning), and the good, clean scent of his skin.

“Hi there, Annie,” he said. His eyelashes were long and curly, the kind a girl would spend forever torturing herself with an eyelash curler clamped against her lids to achieve. I remember exactly what I was wearing: a red jersey Henley T-shirt with three buttons at the collar and my favorite pair of jeans, the size-ten Calvin Kleins, a silver locket on a heart that my father had given me for my sweet sixteen. My hair was long, in ringlets that I crafted each morning with a curling iron, and I wore big hoop earrings, studded with fake diamonds, that swung almost to my shoulders and made me look like J.Lo, my fashion icon at the time. “Want to go to the Sweethearts Dance with me?” Frank asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, yeah, I’d like that.”

My girlfriends started giggling. I blushed, admiring him for the way he’d asked, for approaching me in public instead of with a phone call, for risking embarrassment. I also couldn’t quite believe that he knew who I was, that I wasn’t just one of the faceless girls who moved through the same hallways and classrooms but might as well have inhabited a different world. But I also had the strangest sense that I knew him. . that, somehow, my entire time in high school, maybe even my entire life, had been leading up to this conversation.

“I’ll pick you up at six,” he told me. He was very calm, looking at me steadily, ignoring my friends. “We can go to dinner first, if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” I said again. “I live on Crestview.”

“I know.” He walked off, and my girlfriends fell on me, scooping me up like a quarterback in a huddle.

“Oh my God! Frank Barrow!” I smiled, feeling flushed, almost feverish. I still couldn’t quite figure out how he knew me. The next week revealed nothing. Frank smiled when he saw me in the hallways. At lunch, he’d make a point of coming over and saying “hello.” But that was all. I should have been frantic with nerves, part of me wondering if he’d asked me out as some kind of joke or dare. (In the movies I loved, the ones I’d watch every time they came on cable, 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed, things like that happened, there were pranks and jokes and misunderstandings, but the boy and the girl always wound up together, the way they were meant to be.)

My friends were useless when it came to figuring out what was behind Frank Barrow’s interest, but full of suggestions about what I should wear. I had the dress I’d bought for homecoming, but I wanted something new for Frank. So I used eighty dollars of my babysitting money to buy a simple sleeveless dress in periwinkle blue, with a deep V-neck and a skirt that swished around my ankles and had braided gold metal buckles at the shoulders, an inexpensive knockoff of the Badgley Mischka gown Kate Winslet had worn to the Oscars that year. I borrowed a pair of gold strappy sandals from Nancy and paid another twenty dollars to go to the beauty school and have my hair curled, then arranged in an updo, with a little rhinestone butterfly clipped over my right ear.

Frank wore a dark-blue suit with a light-blue tie almost the exact same shade as my dress. He held my arm as he walked me to his car, which was his father’s Buick, very old but very clean (I learned later he’d washed and waxed and vacuumed it for the occasion). It wasn’t until he was backing out of my driveway, one arm over my seat, that I realized I didn’t know where we were going. Before homecoming that fall, my date and I and three other couples had gone to the Chart House in Center City, which was, as the name implied, right on the water (the Delaware, which wasn’t one of the world’s prettiest rivers, but when you lived in Philadelphia, you took what you could get). The tables there were set with an array of silverware that most of us found bewildering, and the cheapest entrée, pasta with roasted seasonal vegetables, cost fourteen dollars.

“Burgers okay?” asked Frank.

“Sure!” My voice was too loud. I worried that it sounded like I was disappointed and trying to hide it, but the truth was, I’d left the Chart House with a stomachache, brought on, I figured, by sitting up perfectly straight terrified that I was going to spill salad dressing or step on the hem of my dress or do something that would reveal to the grown-ups eating their meals at the tables around us that none of us had any business being there.

Frank drove to McDonald’s on Broad Street. “Wait here,” he said, hopping out of the car. Five minutes later, he came back with a steaming, fragrant bag, already spotted with grease from the fries. My stomach growled, and, instead of being mortified, I laughed — I hadn’t eaten in days so I could look good in my gown.

Frank didn’t say much, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, as he drove to Fairmount Park, then up the steep, twisting road called South George’s Hill. He parked right behind the Mann Center, an outdoor concert hall that was dark and quiet that night. This was a noted makeout spot where more than a few of my dates had ended. At that hour it was too cold and dark for the runners and cyclists to be out, and too soon for the couples. The sun was just setting, the sky fading from pale blue to indigo, and the city was spread out like a gorgeous quilt of light beneath us. We sat in the car with the windows cracked open and the heater on and a wool blanket Frank had pulled out of the trunk over our laps, eating Big Macs and fries and sipping vanilla shakes.

Sitting with him, I felt none of the nerves I’d felt with other boys, none of the awkwardness of wondering whether I looked right or sounded right or was saying the right things. Frank hadn’t offered me any liquor, nor had he made a dive toward my mouth or my bra hooks. He asked me questions and listened, respectfully, while I answered. We were talking about Dana Hightower, who’d allegedly transferred to a magnet school in Center City but who had really, my girlfriends and I suspected, been sent away to have a baby, when I blurted, “Why’d you ask me to the dance?”

He lowered his lashes. I remember how perfect he looked, his white shirt crisp, his cheeks freshly shaven, how he smelled like soap and a citrusy aftershave. I remember the song on the radio was called “Angel of Mine,” and feeling once more that sense, undeniable, overwhelming, that this had all been arranged beforehand, that he and I were meant to be, that we were going to be, and that I didn’t even have much say in the matter. “Why?” he asked. “You don’t want to go?”

“No, it’s not that, it’s that. . I didn’t even think you knew me. Knew who I was. We never talked, and I. .” I shut my mouth and folded my hands in my lap. I’d taken off my shoes and was sitting sideways, my legs curled underneath me. There was a bit of ketchup on my finger, and I licked it off, tasting the sweetness.

Frank looked at me, and there was no trace of teasing in his voice or on his face. “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time.”

“But why?”

Smiling, he touched one of my cheeks with his fingertips. “You’re always smiling.”

“Not always,” I said, thinking about the fights I’d had with Nancy.

“When I see you, you’re smiling, and laughing, and there’s always people around you, you know?”

Now I was blushing, and I imagined that maybe he was, too, although his skin didn’t show it the way mine did.

“You always have people.” He sounded wistful. I could tell that this was hard for Frank — that he knew what he meant to say, what he liked about me, but was having trouble finding the words. “And remember that one time in gym class?”

I shook my head, embarrassed that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“What I said about Ms. Hicks.”

“Oh, right!” Ms. Hicks had taught phys ed since the 1970s. Some years, she’d show up in September a skinny one hundred and twenty pounds, and other years she’d come for Back to School Night closer to two hundred. That year, we’d been lined up to play volleyball and Ms. Hicks, bulging in her blue polyester gym shorts, had been explaining the rules, when Frank, standing behind me, had whispered, “I think she’s been eating ’cause the Eagles had such a bad preseason.”

I’d laughed out loud, then turned around, not even sure who had spoken. Frank was staring at me soberly. “I’m serious,” he said, without even a hint of a smile. “The year we went to the Super Bowl? Thinnest she’s ever been.”

I’d been laughing when Ms. Hicks hurled a volleyball at me, hollering at me to get my head in the game. Later, I’d learned why laughter and people were so important to Frank. His mother had gotten pregnant for the first time at forty-two, after more than two decades of marriage, after she’d given up on the possibility of children and had mostly given up on her marriage as well. She’d loved Frank, but his arrival had been a disruption. Corrinne Barrow wasn’t good with disruptions. Nor was she much of a laugher. She believed in God, and thrice-weekly church attendance; she worked as a medical secretary from seven a.m. to four p.m. each day; she cooked meals for the poor and visited the sick and devoted the hours she wasn’t doing those things to peering through her blinds at the neighbors across the street, who had four kids and innumerable grandchildren and made more noise at one meal than Corrinne and her husband and son did in an entire year. Frank had pegged me right — I did like people, and laughter, music, and stories. I traveled in a crowd, and I loved to have parties, to fill my house with friends, to cook, even if it was just pizza or cookies, to have everyone together, safe and full and happy.

In the car, Frank took my hand and pulled me so close that I could feel his eyelashes on my cheek. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” I answered as he slowly brought his lips to mine. I remember thinking that this was a guy I could love, really love, in a way I hadn’t loved the other boys I’d dated, that he was steady and grown-up in a way that they weren’t. I also knew that parts of Frank would always be a mystery, that there would always be more going on in his head than he’d be able to express with his words.

Almost without discussion, we’d become a couple that night, and, again, almost without discussion, we’d gotten engaged, then married, and we’d slipped into a life that was more or less the same as the life my parents had. By the time we went to that dance, he’d already been in touch with the army recruiter. He enlisted in the spring of his senior year and was off to basic training the week after we graduated. We got married when he came home after his eight weeks in Fort Benning, with new muscles and a new tattoo. Then he went off to Afghanistan, and I got pregnant the first time he came home on leave. His father died, and we named Spencer after him. Together, we cleared out the garage, where Frank’s dad kept most of his things, and slept some nights. I’d been the one to find his cardboard box full of copies of Barely Legal, and I’d thrown them away without saying a word to Frank.

None of this was surprising. In our world, you finished high school and got married, and if you were a girl it was a big point of pride if you didn’t get pregnant before either of those other events. I hadn’t ever thought about college, or traveling, or waiting to start my own family, or having anything that you could call a career as opposed to just a job. I lived my life like a meal that had been set in front of me, never asking if there were other choices or even if I was hungry.

But then, after Spencer came along, and I knew he’d be my last baby, without ever planning on it, I started seeing, and wanting, other things. A picture of a home office in a magazine, a description of Paris in a book, a restaurant review in the Philadelphia Inquirer of a place I knew we could never afford to go — these things, and a hundred more like them, would start a voice whispering in my head. I want, I want, I want, the voice would say. It wanted a new couch; it wanted a vacation somewhere other than Disney World or the Jersey Shore; it wanted to read the books Gabe gave me and not have to look up a word or two every page, sometimes every paragraph. When I asked the voice how on earth I could ever hope to get any of these things, the voice answered, Simple. Money.

I’d never known anyone who’d been a surrogate. A wife carrying someone else’s baby, bringing in more money than her husband would earn in a year and a half, walking around with a belly full of someone else’s child. . that was nothing Frank and I had seen from our parents or cousins or neighbors, nothing that was even a possibility when we were kids. I should have known it would never sit right with Frank, old-fashioned as he was. What happened to us should not have come as a surprise.

At first, it all seemed easy. I got pregnant on the first attempt, in August. There were plenty of things I didn’t know how to do: drive a stick shift, swim underwater, use the microwave for anything other than baking potatoes and popping popcorn. But I knew how to be pregnant. After two boys, I’d even say I was good at it.

I started showing right away, the same way I had with Spencer. Certain things bothered me — the smell of gasoline, the sound of the spoon squishing through the mayonnaise when I made tuna salad. In the afternoons I found myself napping, sometimes on the floor next to Spencer’s crib, conked out on the carpet like I’d been clubbed in the head. At five o’clock I’d sit both boys in front of the TV and scramble to make sure the table was set and the meatloaf or manicotti or chicken-rice bake or whatever I was making was in the oven, that the boys had their hands and faces washed, that their rooms were picked up and their lunchboxes packed by the time Frank came home, so he wouldn’t see how exhausted I was. When I was by myself, my hand resting lightly on my belly, I still felt that surge of excitement and accomplishment. I am doing something important, I would think. I was bringing a new life into the world, giving a family this incredible gift (never mind that it was a gift they were buying). . what could be better, more noble, than that?

“How’s Frank handling everything?” my sister asked me when we were at our parents’ house for dinner one night.

“Frank is fine,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t even close to being true. Frank, who was at that moment seated in front of the television set, watching the Eagles, was barely looking at me, not at my face and certainly not at my body as it started to change. That night, on the way home, with both boys sleeping in their car seats, I’d ventured a question. “Are you okay? With. .” Frank hadn’t taken his eyes off the road.

“I guess I have to be, don’t I?”

“It’s just a few more months,” I said softly. He didn’t answer, but I felt the car speed up, as if by mashing his foot on the gas pedal he could hasten the baby’s arrival.

As the fall went on, he rarely asked how I was feeling, the way he had with both of the boys. Then, he’d been tender and considerate, opening bottles of seltzer so they’d go flat, the way I liked it, before pouring me a glass, sweeping and mopping the floors so that I wouldn’t have to bend. On nights when we were both home, I would prop my feet in his lap and he’d rub them with lotion, massaging them. Whenever we went out with the boys, he’d always double-check to make sure the diaper bag was packed. Now when he was home he’d sit in his recliner, eyes on the television, jaw set. . and, more then once, running errands or at the library, I’d reached into the diaper bag and found that I was missing wipes or diapers or an extra pair of size 3T pants. Frank seemed to have decided that the bag, once his responsibility, was now my job, along with everything else around the house.

I tried to talk to him, but every time I asked if there was something wrong, he denied it. “What could be wrong?” he’d ask with a tight smile. That smile scared me, which meant that I never tried to ask follow-up questions, to point out the things I’d noticed, the way his eyes slid away from my belly, the way he hardly ever touched me anymore. The first time we’d tried to make love after the test had come back positive, everything had been fine at first — his mouth nuzzling the skin beneath my ear, my hands roaming over the deliciously taut muscles of his shoulders and his back. When he’d rolled on top of me I’d been wet and more than ready, pushing my hips up hard to meet him… but there’d been nothing there.

“Sorry,” he’d muttered, rolling onto his side so that I couldn’t see him. “Guess I had too much to drink.” Except he hadn’t had anything more than a single beer before dinner, and dinner had been five hours ago. I touched his shoulder, then the tattoo on his arm. “Is anything bothering you?”

“I’m fine.” His voice was loud.

I pulled up my panties and pajama bottoms. “It happens,” I said to the ceiling. At least I’d heard that it happened. It had never happened to Frank before, and I knew what was wrong, even if he didn’t want to say anything: it was the baby. He was worried about this baby in a way he’d never worried about his own. We’d made love right up until the ninth month with the boys, only stopping because I’d gotten too tired to do anything in bed except sleep, but now that I was carrying someone else’s baby, Frank couldn’t. . or wouldn’t. I was never sure, because I couldn’t get him to talk about it, and there was no one I could ask.

The real trouble started when I was thirteen weeks along. I was in the living room with the boys, the three of us putting together a giant puzzle of the White House on the floor — I’d bought it for a quarter at a tag sale — when I heard a crash from the kitchen, and Frank cursing. I ran in to find him throwing a loaf of bread at the wall. “Goddamn stupid crap!”

“What’s wrong?” I looked at the plate on the table and saw the ragged remnants of half of a sandwich. He’d tried to fold the bread in half, only instead of folding, it had crumbled.

I crouched down to pick up the mess. “It’s organic.” It was true, the bread India wanted me eating, made without additives or preservatives, was considerably harder to fold than the Wonder bread I normally brought.

“It’s crap,” he said again, and kicked the wall on his way out. I winced, hoping the boys hadn’t heard.

It took me a while to realize that it hadn’t been a coincidence, Frank losing his temper the day after we’d done our bills. We paid them the same way we always did, in the living room after the boys were asleep, Frank in a chair with the stack of mail, me on the couch with the checkbook, only for once things had gone smoothly, thanks to the money from the clinic I’d deposited in our account, the first installment of the fifty thousand dollars I’d eventually get. We paid off the balance on one of our credit cards, and another two thousand dollars on a second card, instead of just the minimums the way we normally did, and we hadn’t had to decide whether to be a few days’ late with one of the utilities. For once, there was enough to go around, with money left over at the end, and I’d been stupid enough to smile about it, to say, “Wow, this is great,” without realizing how my comment would hurt him.

“Couples fight when the woman gets pregnant,” India said via Skype the day after our fight. It was funny, listening to her talk like she was some kind of expert on marriage after less than two years as a wife. Since the insemination, I’d gone to New York twice, arranging for my mother to pick up the boys after school. India and I also chatted by Skype every few days on the brand-new laptop she had insisted on buying me.

At first I’d been worried that it would feel like India was checking up on me, but gradually we’d started to feel. . not exactly like friends, but more like coworkers who were friendly, who could share a meal and gossip about their lives.

“Men have mood swings and cravings,” she told me. “I saw a thing about it on the Today show.”

“How about you?” I asked. I’d told her about the argument, leaving out the particulars — the broken plate, the cursing — and now I was eager to steer the talk toward safer ground. “Are you having any cravings?” That was, of course, a joke: even on the computer screen that only showed her from the neck up, I could see she was skinny as ever, her skin smooth, her eyebrows and makeup all perfect.

“Nope,” she’d said. “I’m very horny, though.” My mouth must have fallen open because she’d laughed. “Don’t look so shocked,” she’d said. “I’m not that old.” This was true — she wasn’t that old, but her husband was. I’d met him after my first doctor’s appointment in the city. “Look at me,” he’d said, escorting us down the sidewalk, “taking two beautiful ladies to lunch.” We’d gone to a French restaurant near the doctor’s office, a place with white tablecloths and a long, skinny loaf of bread in a paper bag in the center of the table, along with a crock of unsalted butter. Marcus, who I knew was a very big deal, had been friendly, asking questions about my house and my boys and if I followed the Phillies, but he’d been distracted when the food came, tapping at his BlackBerry, and excused himself after downing his steak frites (I’d ordered the same thing; India had sea bass en papillote). He was nice-enough-looking for a man his age, with thick hair and big white teeth. I could feel the energy of the room change when we arrived, and I noticed people looking at him, the hostess’s respectful manner as she took his coat. Marcus was polite to her, and interested in me in the same way, but most of his attention he reserved for his wife. He clearly adored India, but I couldn’t imagine him having sex. I couldn’t even picture him without a suit and tie. That must have shown on my face, because India started to laugh.

“Oh, look at you!” she said, her cheeks turning pink. “You’re making me feel like a dirty old lady!”

I turned down the volume on the computer, angling the screen so it faced away from the bedroom, where Frank was still asleep.

“I’m just jealous,” I confessed.

“So you guys aren’t, um, active?”

I didn’t want to say, but my face must have given her an answer. “Men get weird about it,” she said. “Get him drunk! Buy some scented candles! Wear something fitted! I just saw the most gorgeous cashmere sweaters in these scrumptious colors…”

I nodded politely. India lowered her voice. “Do you think the baby’s listening?”

“I don’t think the baby has ears.” Honestly, I wasn’t sure what the baby had and didn’t have. With Frank Junior and Spencer I’d signed up for e-mail updates telling me what the fetus was doing or growing at that very moment. I’d been tuned in to every change in my body, every flutter and kick, but now, with two boys to care for and a husband who wasn’t inclined to help, plus the knowledge that this baby wasn’t mine to keep, I wasn’t paying the same kind of attention.

“So what’s the problem?” India asked.

“Everything’s fine. We’re going at it night and day. Right on top of Mount Laundry, while the boys are kicking a soccer ball at the bedroom door.”

India sighed. “I feel bad.”

“Oh, no,” I said, worried, again, that she thought I was hitting her up for more money. “It’s no big deal!”

“I’d be happy to hire a cleaning lady…”

“I don’t work,” I said. “I can clean.”

“But you’re tired.”

“I’m fine,” I said firmly. My mother had hated housework, heaving epic sighs every time she fetched the vacuum out of the closet or the bucket out from underneath the sink, but I’d always liked it. There were few things I found more peaceful than carrying a basket full of warm, clean clothes into the empty TV room and folding them while I watched one of my shows.

“You’re so cute,” India had said fondly when I’d told her how I liked doing the laundry, and I’d smiled, but in the back of my mind I was thinking of another book, The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel Gabe had recommended after I’d asked him, half teasing, if all the books he read were by men. The book was set in the future, where fertile women were given to powerful men and their old wives to have babies for them. I remembered the way the old commander’s wife had hated Offred, the handmaid, the one who was supposed to bear her children, and I wondered sometimes whether, behind all the smiles and the friendliness and the gift cards for Whole Foods, India secretly hated me, too.

Then it was Christmas. We were hosting Frank’s mother, Corrinne, and my parents, plus Nancy and Dr. Scott. On Christmas Day, I tried to take our usual picture in front of the tree. Frank Junior and Spencer looked adorable in their suits and bow ties. I looked pregnant in my black velvet dress. Frank, standing behind me, with one hand on each of the boys’ shoulders, looked glum. Beyond glum. He looked miserable. “Smile!” I called, running back and forth from the tripod to the fireplace, where the boys kept trying to turn around to see if Santa had refilled their stockings between shots. Frank never smiled. His eyes were hooded, his lips pressed tightly together, like he was trying to keep himself from shouting. I knew, before I even looked at the shots, that none of them were keepers.

I put a roast in the oven in the morning and slid my side dishes in to heat at noon. By two o’clock, I’d just finished setting the table when the doorbell rang. My parents came inside with their arms full of presents, my father gruff and bulky, my mother giggly and flushed. “Hi, honey,” she said, and hugged me.

“Come in, Mom,” I said. “Let me take your coat.” She’d dressed in the plaid pants she insisted on wearing each Christmas even though she’d gained a good twenty pounds since she’d bought them, and the zipper would race down her belly, revealing a beige triangle of girdle, if she made any sudden movements. On top, she wore a green sweater with an appliquéd Santa ho-ho-ho-ing across her chest. A tiny brass bell jingled from the top of Santa’s cap. Red-and-green-striped socks peeked out of the tops of her shoes. She was carrying an aluminum commuter mug that read JINGLE BELLS and did not smell like it contained coffee.

“So!” my mother said, clapping her hands and following me into the kitchen as Frank ushered his mom through the door and into the living room. “How’s the baby?”

“Fine,” I said, hanging her coat as the doorbell rang again. “Oh, it’s Nancy!” said my mother, like this was the best news in the world.

“Where can I put these?” Nancy demanded, brandishing a pair of raw sweet potatoes like they were grenades.

I put the sweet potatoes and her Brussels sprouts on the counter while Dr. Scott joined Frank on the couch.

Back in the kitchen, my mother was standing over the sink, washing the two teaspoons and the single coffee mug I hadn’t cleaned yet, and Nancy was poking suspiciously at my microwave.

“You look great,” I said, admiring my sister’s belted ivory wool sweater dress and high-heeled caramel-colored leather boots.

“Thanks,” she said. “Anne Klein.” Nancy had a new habit of telling you either who’d designed her outfit or how much it cost. She looked me up and down, clearly struggling to find something nice to say about my dress, the black one she’d seen a million times, and my black ballet slippers. I thought about saying “Target” or “Payless” but figured she wouldn’t get the joke.

“Boys, why don’t you go upstairs and play?” I suggested. For Christmas, Santa had bought them a Wii that I’d put on layaway, and we’d set it up in the bedroom that would be a playroom someday. Frank Junior went thundering up the stairs to claim the first round, while Spencer hung on to my skirt, blinking shyly at his aunt and trying to sneak his thumb into his mouth.

I slid my lasagna out of the oven, tossed lettuce and croutons into a bowl, and put Nancy’s sweet potatoes into the microwave, looking at the clock and knowing that Frank expected dinner on the table at four o’clock sharp.

“Roast beef, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans. . Frank!” I called. “I could use a hand in here!”

Frank didn’t answer. Nancy, frowning, not missing a thing, pulled serving platters out of the cabinet as I put on the oven mitts, crouched down clumsily, and started pulling dishes and platters and roasting pans out of the oven and hurrying food to the table, which I’d set with an ironed white tablecloth and bunches of pine cones that the boys and I had gathered the day before.

My father carved the meat. My mother poured the wine. Nancy pulled out a serving spoon to scoop mashed potatoes. She did it like she was lifting weights or pulling something unpleasant out of the ground, fast and joylessly. Frank helped his mother to the table, then bent his head.

“Let us pray,” said Corrinne. My dad, who’d already started filling his plate, set the spoon down with a clang and a guilty look. I bowed my head, then lifted it, looking sharply at both of my boys until they, too, had dropped their eyes. “Be present at our table, Lord, at Christmas and all times adored. Thy creatures bless and grant that we may feast in paradise with Thee.” She paused, then said, “Help us to do Your bidding, O Lord, to be Your obedient servants, to know Your will and never presume to replace it with our own.”

“A-men!” my father said, and snagged the crispy end of the roast beef off the platter before anyone else could get a crack at it.

Corrinne kept her head bent piously, her hands folded in her lap, before she raised her head and looked at me. “I’ve been praying for you, Annie.”

Puzzled and unsure of the polite response, I just said, “Thank you.” I glanced at Frank, hoping for guidance or, at least, sympathy, but he was focused on spooning green bean casserole onto his plate.

“I should tell you,” Corrinne continued, “that I have concerns about what you’re doing. I’ve discussed it with Pastor.”

Anger curled in my belly and began a slow crawl up my throat. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine. Really.”

“But you’re not,” Corrinne said. “I know you think I’m a busybody, but if you saw someone getting ready to jump off a building, you’d try to talk them out of it. That would be your duty.”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I lied.

“You have sinned,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if she was telling me I’d brushed my teeth that morning. “You have presumed to know the will of God. But it’s never too late to turn away from wickedness.”

I felt my face get hot. “All I’m trying to do is help my family. How does that mean I’ve presumed to know the will of God?”

“God decides who He blesses with children,” said Corrinne. “All of this science, all these interventions, fly in the face of God’s plan.”

“That’s exactly what I think,” said Nancy. My jaw fell open. I made myself shut it, and looked down at Spencer, who was grimly pushing peas underneath his mashed potatoes. “Used to be, if you were infertile, you’d be an aunt or get a dog or whatever. Now, everyone just thinks they can control everything. Make it just the way they want it.”

“Amen,” said Corrinne. I looked at Frank again, waiting for a lifeboat that clearly wasn’t coming. I narrowed my eyes at my sister, who stared back at me expressionless; my sister with her Botox shots and her banded stomach, lecturing me about how it was wrong to use technology to improve things.

“All I know,” I said, trying not to let them hear my voice shake, “is that I’m making the best decisions I can, for my family.”

“Has anyone tried the lasagna?” my mother chirped from her end of the table. Corrinne finally shut her mouth. My face was burning as I turned to my right in time to see Frank Junior shoving a forkful of stuffing in his mouth. He grimaced, than spat his mouthful into his napkin.

“It’s not from the red box,” he complained.

“Grammy made this from scratch, which is much better.”

“No, it’s not better.” He frowned. “It’s yucky.”

“Frank Junior,” said Frank, raising his voice, and Frank Junior, hearing the implied promise of a spanking, meekly took a bite. I looked at my husband again, hoping against hope that he’d tell everyone that he supported what I was doing; that he approved; that he was grateful. But, after glaring at his son, Frank just kept eating, and, eventually, my mother started chatting with Corrinne about canning tomatoes, and Scott started talking football with anyone who’d listen, and we made it through the meal.

There were presents under the tree for the boys, new shirts and sneakers from my parents, and a book apiece from Nancy and Scott. Spencer was delighted — honestly, Spencer would have been delighted with an empty box and a bow — but Frank Junior rolled his eyes. “More boring books,” he said under his breath. Frank snatched him up so fast that he didn’t have time to scream. He hustled him out the door and around the back of the house, but we could all hear Frank Junior squealing and the sound of his daddy’s hand making contact with his backside; once, twice, three times. I couldn’t keep from wincing. “Spare the rod,” Frank’s mother intoned, and my father yawned, then looked at me and said, “Come on, Annie, it’s not the end of the world. You girls went to bed with warm bottoms a few times, and you’re both just fine.”

I struggled to my feet. “You know what?” My voice was pleasant, even, not too loud. “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll lie down for a minute.” Ignoring the murmurs of concerns, my mother’s offer to make me a cup of tea and Nancy telling everyone that it was probably heartburn, I hurried up the stairs, collapsed on my bed, and started to cry. I was doing a good thing, I told myself. This was money for the four of us, money that I was working to earn, putting my body through the strains and risks of another pregnancy, so why couldn’t any of them see it? Why didn’t any of them appreciate the sacrifices I was making for Frank, for our boys, for our family? I’d done the best I could, made what I thought was a good decision, and what had I gotten but a husband who wouldn’t look at me or talk to me, a sister who thought I was no better than a prostitute, and a mother-in-law who thought I was immoral?

I rolled over, flipped open my laptop, and, before I could think about what I was doing, connected to Skype and clicked on India’s number.

Not home, I thought, but India picked up after the first ring. “Hi, Annie! Merry Christmas! How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I said. . but I must not have looked fine, because India’s eyes narrowed.

“Oh my God. What is it? What’s wrong? Did something happen? Is the baby okay?”

“No, no,” I said, wiping my cheeks and cursing myself for scaring her. “The baby’s fine, everything’s all right, it’s just. .” What could I tell her? That I’d gotten in a fight with my mother-in-law? That my husband hadn’t stood up for me? “I don’t know,” I finally said. “Maybe it’s just the holidays.”

“You’re overwhelmed.” India’s voice was kind. “And you must be exhausted. The weather’s been so terrible, and with two little boys. . I don’t know how you’re managing.”

“I’m okay.” I was already regretting the call. What had I been thinking? That she’d fix things? That she’d know what to do? How could she give me any advice, how could she help, if I couldn’t even tell her what was wrong?

“I’ve got an idea. You and I should go somewhere warm for a few days.”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t leave. I’ve got so much to do, and Spencer and Frank Junior…”

“I can find them a sitter. Or maybe your parents…?”

I nodded, almost in spite of myself. More than once my mother had offered to host both boys for a few nights over the holidays, but I’d been so intent on proving I could handle everything — the boys, the pregnancy, my sullen husband — that I’d refused.

“They’re in Philadelphia, right? How about this? Text me if they can do it, and I’ll meet you at their house at noon. You should pack for three days.” She smiled. “And bring a swimsuit.”

“Oh, no, really. I couldn’t.”

“I’m not taking no for an answer. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Where will we go?” I managed to ask.

“That,” said India, “is for me to know and you to find out.”

I hid in the bedroom, listening for the slamming doors and the car engines starting, until I was sure everyone was gone. Then I came downstairs to find Frank — big surprise — in front of the TV. “I’m going away for a few days,” I announced — not asking him, but, for the first time in my marriage, telling him. He nodded wordlessly, not even asking where I was going or with whom, before I went back to the kitchen to start on the dishes and he went back to the game. “Don’t go to bed angry,” the self-help books all said, but that night I fell asleep furious. . and, as for Frank, for all I knew he’d never come to bed at all.

The next morning, I packed two suitcases, loaded the diaper bag and drove to Philadelphia. India was waiting for me, sitting in the backseat of a Town Car that was idling at the curb in front of my parents’ condo. I got the boys out of the backseat, glad they were still neat, in jeans and miniature matching plaid shirts, that their noses were wiped and their shoes were tied. “Frank Junior, Spencer, this is Mrs. Croft.” Both boys held out their hands, like their father and I had taught them. Then Spencer picked up the diaper bag and Frank started pulling the suitcase, and we led the way up the steps to my parents’ door.

“Oh my God, look at them,” said India, with her hands clasped at her chest. “They are the cutest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

I thanked her, grateful that someone appreciated the work I was doing. The boys hugged my mother, then sat on the couch, with Frank Junior spreading out the old Candy Land board on the coffee table. Aware of India watching me, I knelt down and looked at both of them. “Mommy’s going away for a few days, and you get to stay with Grammy and Grampy. I want you both to be good boys. Listen to Grammy and do as you’re told. Frank Junior, you take care of your brother.” Frank nodded. Spencer hugged me, pressing his warm cheek against mine.

“Mommy, don’t go.”

My throat tightened. I’d never left him for longer than an afternoon before. “Mommy always comes back. Remember?”

He nodded gravely. “Always comes back.”

“Don’t worry,” said Frank Junior. “I’ll take care of him.”

I kissed them both, hugged my mother, then got in the back of India’s car. It took me until we were on the highway to realize that she was staring at me like I’d just turned wine into water, or started levitating.

“What?”

“You’re so good with them.” She sounded wistful. “How’d you learn to be such a good mother?”

I felt myself flush with pleasure. “Oh, I have my moments.”

“Do you yell?”

I thought for a minute, then shook my head. I got impatient, got bored sometimes, and often wished I could have more privacy, more time to myself, more sleep. . but I honestly enjoyed my boys’ company, and I wasn’t much of a yeller at anyone, let alone my sons.

“And you don’t spank them. .” Her voice trailed off as I shook my head again. She laughed. “Not that I’m planning on spanking this baby! It’s just that you’re so patient.”

“You’ll learn,” I told her. “You’ll see. When it’s your own baby, you’ll be surprised at how it all just falls into place.” Meanwhile, I was almost falling asleep. The car had the smoothest ride I’d ever felt, and the backseat felt soft as a bed. India still looked concerned, rolling the strap of her handbag between her fingertips.

“I guess there’s classes I can take.”

I stifled a yawn. “You don’t need classes. You’ll be a natural.” I could tell that she was worrying, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I dozed the whole way to the airport, glad that we were flying out of a different terminal from the one where Frank worked, and I ended up sleeping for the entire trip down to West Palm Beach.

Another car met us at the airport, the uniformed driver waiting by baggage claim, holding a sign that read CROFT. “Have you ladies stayed at the Breakers before?” he asked.

“I have, my friend hasn’t,” said India.

“Well, ma’am, you’re in for a real treat.” He drove us through the gates of a building that looked like the largest, grandest country club in the world. India spoke to the uniformed woman behind the desk, who handed her two keys and two bottles of water. A bellman took our luggage, and India led me to the elevator.

My room — a suite, really — was beautiful, with pale-green carpet and a canopied bed, a deep tub and separate shower in the bathroom, a balcony with a view over a linked complex of swimming pools and, beyond it, the golden sand of the beach. I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed, my cheek against the pillow, which was deliciously crisp and cool. Maybe for a few minutes, I thought, and closed my eyes again. When I opened them again it was nine o’clock the next morning, and there were two notes that had been slipped under the door; one from housekeeping, apologizing for not being able to give me turn-down service the night before, the other from India. Call me when you’re up, Sleepyhead!

“I’m so sorry,” I told her twenty minutes later. At her instructions, I’d put on my swimsuit, then a cover-up, one of Frank’s button-down shirts. We were having breakfast by the pool: eggs Benedict, fresh-squeezed orange juice, a basket of muffins and croissants. I’d looked at the prices, then shut my menu fast and tried to tell myself that maybe the prices were in Monopoly money, or some kind of currency used only in this hotel that had no relationship to actual dollars and cents. Waiters in white shirts and green pants or skirts hovered, waiting to swoop in the instant we needed something: more water, more coffee, more tiny bottles of honey and jam for the croissants.

“Please. I feel terrible that I had no idea how exhausted you were!” She looked at me earnestly from under the deep brim of a straw sunhat tied with a jaunty pink ribbon that matched her dress. “You have to take care of yourself.”

“I’m sure the baby’s fine,” I said.

She waved one freshly manicured hand. “I don’t care about the baby. I mean, I do care about the baby, of course I care about the baby, but I care about you more right now.” She gave me her dazzling smile. “You’re not just the Tupperware, you know.”

“I know,” I muttered, feeling guilty for ever having doubted her, for comparing her to the scrawny, ancient, resentful wife in some book that I’d read.

“So here’s the plan,” she said. “You’re getting a prenatal massage at two…”

“Oh, India, really, I’m fine.”

She continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “And then a facial and a mani-pedi, and I’ve got a car taking us to Joe’s Stone Crab at seven — it’s a little bit of a drive, but it’s supposed to be the place down here, and we’re not leaving until we eat some Key lime pie.”

“That sounds amazing,” I told her. . and then, feeling shy, I said, “but first, can I go for a swim?”

She indicated the ocean like she’d grown it herself. “Go on.”

I floated in the warm, salty water, the skirt of my maternity suit flapping out around me as the waves lifted me up and lowered me down. I wondered how the boys were doing, how Frank was managing without me. . then I decided that everyone would be fine; that I was here, and I should try to enjoy it.

I rinsed off in my room, then went down to the spa, where I half dozed through a blissful afternoon of being tended to, four hours where all I had to do was lift my arms or close my eyes or tell the masseuse how much pressure I liked. All I had to wear for dinner was my plain old black dress again, but when I got back to my room there were shopping bags arranged on the bed, clothes peeking out of pink and pale-blue tissue: a sundress made of pale yellow linen, a skirt, and a few scoop-necked jersey tops, the same kind of flipflops India had worn, all with the price tags cut so that I couldn’t see how much they’d cost.

I let the crisp fabric of the sundress fall over my shoulders and hips and smoothed lotion from the hotel’s little bottle on my skin, then took the elevator down to where India was waiting for me in the lobby. There was another car outside that took us to South Beach. The restaurant was big and crowded, full of groups that all seemed to be celebrating something. Over dinner — caesar salad, warm rolls, crab legs for both of us — India told me her story — how she, too, had grown up without much; how she’d gone to Los Angeles to try to be an actress, how she’d moved to New York City to work in public relations, how she’d met Marcus in a Starbucks, of all places. “What was that like?” I asked. What I really wanted to ask was, how had she found the confidence to go to a city all the way on the other side of the country, to get herself the kind of job I hadn’t even known existed, to turn herself into the kind of person Marcus wanted? She was so much smarter than I was, so much more clever, and I listened closely as she explained how she’d figured out what publicists were and what they did; how she’d made connections and networked with the right people to get an internship, then a job.

At the end of the meal, over decaf coffee and a slice of that tart, rich Key lime pie, India bent her head, suddenly shy. “I bought you something,” she said. “Merry Christmas.” She handed me a little velvet box. Inside was a necklace, a gorgeous green stone suspended on a shimmering length of silver chain. “Emerald,” she said. “It’s the baby’s birthstone. I wanted you to have something so you can always feel close to her. Or him.” She smiled — she and Marcus had decided not to learn the baby’s gender, but we were both secretly convinced that I was carrying a girl.

My throat tightened. No one had ever given me jewelry, except for my engagement ring, and of course I had nothing for her except the card and the homemade raspberry jam I’d sent to her apartment before Christmas. “Oh, India. It’s beautiful, but it’s way too much.”

“No,” she said. Her eyes were shining. “No, it is not too much. What you’re doing for Marcus and me, there’s nothing we could ever pay you to thank you enough.”

We hugged, and I told myself to stop being so critical, to just enjoy the night, the sweet taste of fresh crab, which I’d never had before, and how lovely it was to slip deeply into those cool, crisp sheets in an immaculate room and sleep in as late as I wanted, to wander on the beach for hours, the sand warm and firm against my bare feet.

“Now listen,” she said, as we drove back to the airport. “If you start feeling overwhelmed or tired like that again, you call me, no matter what. I’m finding you a cleaning lady, and don’t even try to talk me out of it. It’s ridiculous that you’re scrubbing floors.”

“Lots of people do,” I pointed out.

“Lots of people don’t have a choice. But you do. So no arguments.”

“Thank you,” I said, for possibly the hundredth time in the last two days. The words were completely inadequate, but what else could I say? That she’d changed my life? That, looking at her, I was starting to think about how things could have gone differently for me, and what might still be possible? That it was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time?

“Travel safe,” she said, hugging me. . and in that moment I believed that if everything had been equal, if we’d met in school or working some job or pushing our new babies on swings in the playground, that India Croft and I could actually have been friends.

I made the trip in reverse: car to the West Palm Beach airport, plane to Philadelphia, car back to my parents’ house to pick up the boys. “They were angels,” said my mother, but she looked hollow-eyed, like she couldn’t wait to go back to her couch and catch up with her TV friends. My house hadn’t been trashed — there were no piles of dirty dishes or dirty laundry, no chair that had been flung through the television set — but Frank hadn’t done much cleaning. Things appeared to be exactly as I’d left them after Christmas dinner, the platters still in the drainboard next to the sink, the pine cones still in the middle of the dining-room table. Frank helped me bring the suitcases inside. Then he stayed out of my way, not offering to help as I fed the boys dinner and got us unpacked.

Finally, at eight o’clock, with the boys washed and brushed and tucked into their beds, I stood at the doorway of the family room. Frank was once again planted in front of the television set, watching some comedy with a cackling laugh track. I planted myself in front of the screen and stood there until he clicked it into silence.

“Nice necklace,” he said — the first words he’d spoken other than a muttered “hello” when I’d arrived.

I felt myself blushing, but I didn’t back down. “India gave it to me. It’s the baby’s birthstone. So I can remember her.”

“Must be nice,” he said sarcastically. “A friend who can give you presents like that.”

I felt like throwing something at him, but I didn’t want to wake up the boys. “I don’t care about jewelry! For God’s sake, Frank, all I wanted to do was get us out of this mess, get us a little extra money…”

“Well, you did it. Good for you.”

“Frank,” I said. My voice cracked. “What do you want me to do? I can’t undo this,” I said, running my hand over my belly, so he’d know what I was talking about.

“I don’t know.” He bit off each word, and I realized that he wasn’t just angry, the way I’d seen him a few times over the years, when the bill collectors would call, or the time he’d been passed over for a promotion. He was way past angry. He was furious. . and it scared me.

He got to his feet. “I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll go stay with my mom for a while.”

“You do that.” The words were out of my mouth before I could think about them, but it only took me a moment to realize that this was the right choice, maybe the only choice. Angry as he was, I didn’t want to be around him, and I didn’t want the boys around him, either.

“This was a mistake,” he said, walking past me without sparing me a glance. Questions swirled in my head: Would he come back? Would he see the boys? Was this a separation? Did he want to get divorced? But I didn’t ask any of them. I just stood there, frozen, unbelieving, as he climbed up the stairs, packed a bag, climbed into the car, and drove off into the dark.

It started out a day like any other chilly, gray-sky April morning. I woke up feeling Marcus’s lips on my forehead, hearing the soft clink as he set down a cup of tea beside me. “How is the mother-to-be?” he asked, and I smiled. Neither of us was trying to pretend that the situation was anything other than what it was, but Marcus still treated me like I was expecting. We had the ultrasound pictures stuck to our refrigerator with a magnet; we sent Annie downloadable recordings of our voices reading the baby stories and singing lullabies, and kept a calender marked with red Xs through each day before the baby’s arrival hanging on my dressing room door.

Once Marcus was showered and dressed and off to work, I padded to my dressing room and pulled on the workout clothes I’d laid out the night before — tights and running pants, a long-sleeved Under Armour shirt with a fleece jacket on top of it.

My trainer met me in the lobby, and we jogged across the street, across the wide sidewalk through the gap in the stone gate and into the park for the usual ninety minutes of torture. Back at home, my breakfast was waiting for me on a tray: a white china plate covered with almonds, dried apricots, a peeled, cored apple cut into slices so thin they were translucent, and a hard-boiled egg. I looked longingly at Marcus’s soaking tub before skinning off my sweaty clothes. It wasn’t as if my shower was Spartan: the water assaulted me from a half-dozen nozzles and there was a marble ledge, specially designed so I’d have a place to prop up my foot while I shaved my legs. Some couples had his-and-hers sinks. Marcus and I had his-and-hers bathrooms. “It’s the secret of a happy marriage,” I’d told Annie. “That, and Viagra.” The truth was, Marcus liked to visit me in my bathroom, knocking on the door in his bathrobe. Sometimes he’d slip into the shower with me, getting his hands slick with soap and running them over my body, and sometimes this would lead to sex, but, more often, he’d just pull up the chair from my vanity and sit by the shower, talking about nothing and everything, his children, his colleagues, the next trip we’d take. At first I’d been shy about letting him see me backstage — he didn’t need to know that I used concealer or plucked my eyebrows — but, after a while, I found that I genuinely enjoyed his company, and I looked forward to those mornings more than any other part of the day.

By ten o’clock I was out the door, dressed, hair blown straight, makeup applied. In my office, I sipped a latte and returned calls and e-mails for an hour and a half, revising a press release announcing my jewelry company’s new line of charm bracelets (“The perfect gift for Mother’s Day!”), calling to confirm receipt for the invitations we’d sent for a cocktail party in honor of a bridal magazine’s new editor, their fourth in three years. I was taking my assistant Daphne to lunch at Michael’s. Then I’d head to the salon for a bikini wax and a facial. On Friday, Marcus and I were flying to the Bahamas for the fiftieth birthday of one of Marcus’s partners’ wives — a first wife. Seeing one of those was sort of like glimpsing a rare bird or monkey, a member of an endangered species, upright and uncaged and walking among us.

Daphne and I were halfway through our salads, and I was listening to her tell me about her latest boyfriend’s new job — something to do with corporate branding and search-engine optimization — when my phone trilled from inside my bag. I bent down to look at the number. When I saw that it was Marcus’s office, I picked up fast, pressing the phone against my ear and bending my head close to the table. Marcus and I emailed. The only times he’d call me during the workday was when it was an emergency.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Croft?” Kelly, one of Marcus’s executive assistants, was on the line, and she sounded as rattled as I’d ever heard her.

I was on my feet before I knew it. Daphne stared at me. What’s wrong? she mouthed. I hurried through the restaurant without answering, not even sparing a glance at Barbara Walters at the table by the window, and stood on the sidewalk as Kelly gave me the details. Chest pain. . called the doctor. . Beth Israel. . intensive care. “Does his cardiologist know? Is it the same blocked artery?”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Croft, but I told you everything they told me.”

“I’ll be right there,” I told her. I ran out the door and into the first cab I saw, snapping out the hospital’s address, hardly able to breathe.

What would I do without him? I thought, as the cab made its way downtown. How would I live? How would I pay the bills, how would I manage the staff? I had no idea how any of it worked. I hadn’t wanted to learn. I’d been superstitious, thinking that too many questions would be asking for trouble. I’d turn myself into Bluebeard’s wife. If I went poking around, I’d find. . what? A row of my beheaded predecessors rotting in the basement? Documents showing that Marcus was secretly broke? And what was I doing, thinking this way at a time like this? Marcus. My husband. The man I’d come to love, with all my heart, in spite of myself.

Through the windows, I saw a man with a plastic bag over his hand holding a little dog’s leash, a boy and a girl walking side by side, one earbud of the iPod she carried in each of their ears. I pulled my telephone out of the purse and called Trey at the office and Tommy on his cell phone and Bettina at Kohler’s, saying that I didn’t know what was happening, but that I’d been told it was urgent; that I was on my way to the hospital and that they should probably join me.

“I’ll leave right now,” said Trey.

“Be there as soon as I can,” said Tommy.

Bettina hadn’t said anything before she’d hung up. I knew she was thinking that this was, somehow, my fault, even though I’d been the one to call the doctor that first time, and I’d been the one to monitor his diet, to make sure he took his medication, to buy a treadmill and hire a trainer, to tell him, every night, how much I loved him.

The cab dropped me off by the emergency room. I ran through the automated doors. “Marcus Croft,” I said to the receptionist. My chest was as tight as if someone was squeezing it, the skin of my forearms pebbled with goose bumps. The receptionist pecked at her computer, then gave me directions: elevator to the C wing, down the second hallway, left and then another left, check in at the blue desk, and I hurried away, not feeling the floor underneath me or seeing the faces of the people I passed.

When the elevator doors slid open, there were three nurses gathered around a desk, talking quietly. A blue light flashed in the hall, and an orderly pushed an empty stretcher. “Marcus Croft,” I said. All of them looked up, guiltily, like schoolgirls caught passing notes, and I knew, in that instant, what had happened.

“Oh, God.” My knees felt like they’d melted, and I would have fallen if I hadn’t managed to grab the edge of the desk.

“Where is he?” My voice was loud and high and frantic. I could see my reflection in the pane of glass behind the desk, skin pale, hair disheveled, eyes unrecognizable.

“I’m so sorry,” said the nurse. She was short, round-faced, copper-skinned, wearing white clogs and pale-pink scrubs. I knew exactly how I must have looked to her: too pretty, too thin, too young. I might as well have been wearing a tiara that spelled out the words TROPHY WIFE in flashing neon bulbs above my head.

There was a waiting area up there, a few benches, a few people, the inevitable television bolted to the ceiling, blasting talk-show noise into the hallway. That hospital smell of chicken-noodle soup and industrial cleansers, of blood and rubbing alcohol, filled the air. A mother sat with a toddler in one corner, a little girl she bounced on her knee. I’ll remember this, I thought, trying to catch my breath. I will remember all of this forever.

“Do you want to see him?” asked the nurse.

I did not. I wanted to hold in my memory the way he’d looked the first time I’d seen him in the Starbucks: healthy and fit, splendidly dressed, completely in control of the world around him, confounded by the coffee. Still, I nodded and let the nurse lead me down a hallway and into the tile-floored room where my husband had died.

Marcus lay on a bed, on top of dirtied sheets, alongside a single inside-out rubber glove. There were stickers pasted to his gray-furred chest, wires hooked up to box on a wheeled stand, an IV plugged into his arm. The room smelled like shit. His eyes were closed, his hair sticking up on the back of his head, and his face seemed to have somehow collapsed, giving him the look of a much older man.

“We need to get him cleaned up before the children see him.” My voice came out just right: clear and cultured, a voice used to being obeyed.

“Of course,” said the nurse. She went to the corner and picked up a phone. I reached out, smoothing my husband’s hair and realizing that what I’d suspected was undeniably true. He had been the love of my life. Every night, I’d fallen asleep with his arms around me and his face nestled in my neck. Every morning he’d brought me tea and kissed me. You’re my favorite person in the world, he would say. What will become of me? I wondered again, touching his forehead, feeling his skin, already cool and waxy, underneath my palm.

“What do I do now?” I asked.

The nurse looked at me, not unkindly. She had a ring on her left hand. I wondered if she had children, where she lived, what her life was like, if she was happy, if she was loved. “There’ll be a social worker coming along soon. She can talk to you about arrangements. Do you know what his wishes were?”

I almost laughed. His wishes were that we’d live together for years and years, that we’d travel, go to parties, go to dinners, go dancing. He wanted to buy a house in Vail and take his kids skiing. He wanted to sleep in on the rare Sunday morning he didn’t have to work, and then be woken up with a blow job. “I’m a simple man,” he’d always say when I was done.

“We’re having a baby.” My voice was faint. My hand was still on Marcus’s hair. He’s sleeping, I told myself, even though it didn’t look like that at all. His features had already started to change, to become somehow cruder. The nurse looked at me, surprised, first at my face, then at my belly.

“Oh, not me. A surrogate. She’s — we’re — due in May.”

The nurse looked like she didn’t know what to say to that. I sympathized. Congratulations? I’m sorry? Nothing was right.

There was a sink against the wall, a container of hand soap bolted beside it. In the bathroom, I found paper towels and, in a cabinet along the wall, a kidney-shaped plastic pan. I filled the pan with soap and warm water. Someone had sliced through his shirt and pants, and they lay like a discarded wrapper against him. “Can you help me?” I asked.

“Oh, ma’am, we can take care of that.”

“Please,” I said, and found that I was crying. “Please.”

She helped me shift his body, pulling off the clothes, throwing them away. I wiped off the backs of his legs and pulled the sticky plastic pads off his chest, found a brush in my purse and brushed his hair. “You’re going to be a wonderful mother,” said the nurse, helping me cover him with a clean sheet. She stepped into the hallway, murmuring briefly with one of her compatriots from the desk. Then the kids filed in, Tommy pale and sick-looking, Trey with his wife beside him, Bettina weeping, thin lips trembling over her buck teeth.

“We should call Mom,” she said. “Mom should be here.” They huddled together, and none of them noticed when I slipped out the door.

I left my contact information at the desk. If the nurse there seemed surprised to see me go, she kept it off her face. Maybe she was used to all kinds of strange behavior from the recently bereaved; maybe she was just glad that I wasn’t screaming or tearing at my clothes or threatening to sue someone.

Outside, it was still daytime. The sun was still shining; I could hear music coming from a passing car’s open windows and construction workers shouting as they gutted the building across the street. I texted Manuel and sat on a bench until the big black car glided to the curb. He held the door, and I slid into the backseat. “Mr. Croft died.” It was the first time I’d said it. I imagined it would be the first of many.

He gave a small sigh, and crossed himself. “Ma’am, I’m sorry. He was a good man.” I wondered about that. I knew Marcus was generous to all of his employees. He gave raises and holiday bonuses and paid vacations. I also knew he expected his people to work as hard as he did, to be available whenever he needed them, at five in the morning or in the middle of the night, or on Christmas or on weekends. I didn’t know whether Manuel had a family, whether he’d resented Marcus, or liked him, or felt protective toward him, or jealous of him, or absolutely nothing at all.

“Home?” he asked, and I nodded, wondering how much longer it would be my home. The decorator had finished the nursery the week before. Nice, Marcus had said — a single-word assessment of a room that had cost more than thirty thousand dollars to put together, six thousand for the antique rocking horse alone. It’s crazy, I’d said. . but I’d loved it, and Marcus insisted that I buy it.

As we drove, I felt a bleakness settle through my body. Probably I wouldn’t even be able to stay in the apartment — it would, I guessed, give Bettina and Tommy and Trey a great deal of pleasure to make me leave. Just until the will is probated, they’d say. Just until we get things sorted out. The sorting out would take months, maybe years. There’d be lawyers, hearings, court dates, newspaper stories, unflattering pictures, all my history, my secrets exposed. It was paranoid, I knew — Marcus and I were legally married; this was legally my home. . but I couldn’t shake the feeling, swelling into certainty with each passing block, that his children had never liked me and that they’d do whatever they could to harm me now that their father was dead.

I hurried past the doorman with my head down, hair obscuring my face, and was grateful to find the elevator empty. Upstairs, I took off my high heels and set them neatly by the door. Then I sat on the couch, cross-legged, my head hanging down, my eyes squeezed shut. I didn’t open them until I heard the front door slam. I raised my head and saw Bettina glaring at me. Anger had reddened her cheeks and darkened her eyes. Her hair stood out around her head in ropy tangles. Her lips curled back from her gleaming teeth. In her fury, she almost looked beautiful.

“Did he find out about you? Is that what happened? He found out the truth and had a heart attack?”

“He was at a business lunch,” I said slowly, repeating what I’d been told, before her words could register. Found out about you. For the second time that day I started to shiver. Bettina pulled a folder out of her purse and threw it in my lap. Papers and photographs spilled out onto the carpet. . and there was my old face, staring up at me from the floor.

“Did you tell him?” Bettina asked. Every drop of culture, of private schooling and summers in the Hamptons, was gone from her voice. She sounded as common as my own mother as she shrieked. “Did he know you’d been arrested? Did he know that you were still married when you married him?”

My body sagged against the couch. Blood thundered in my ears, and when I found my voice it was a raspy whisper.

“What are you talking about? I was. . we got…” Divorced, I wanted to say, but Bettina started talking first.

“I hired a detective. I knew you were a liar the first time I saw you. I just didn’t know how bad it was.”

I managed to straighten the pile of pages into a stack. My hands were steady under Bettina’s glare, and my eyes were dry. “Your father didn’t know about any of that. All he knew was that I loved him.”

“Some love,” said Bettina. “How could he have loved you? He didn’t know what you were.” She smiled at me, a horrible, humorless grin. “You thought you’d waltz in here and fuck him to death and get everything. Well, you were wrong, Samantha. You’re not getting shit. I’m going to tell everyone.” She crossed the room in three swift steps and snatched the folder out of my hand. “Everyone. I’m going to ruin you.”

The door slammed shut. I was alone.

I sat for a minute, shaking, numb, breathless, forcing myself to think. What could she do to me? And what would it matter? I’d lost my love. I hadn’t lost my home yet, but that would be coming soon. And there’d be a baby. A baby and no Marcus. In that moment, I was eighteen again, eighteen and trapped and terrified, with no resources, no family, eighteen and barefoot on the black-and-white tiled floor of my first husband’s apartment, shaking so hard that the plus sign on the pregnancy test between my fingers was a blur, and the only words I could think were I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

In the dressing room, I flipped through the hangers until I found the jeans I wanted, a pair left over from my pre-Marcus life, dark-rinsed, worn through at the knee. I put on one of his Tshirts — freshly washed and folded, of course, but I imagined it still retained the ghost of his scent, his cologne and his skin — and a soft gray wool cardigan on top. He is gone, I told myself. He’ll never come through the door again, never kiss me in bed, never pull out a chair for me at dinner, never pull my head into his lap while we’re watching TV. He’ll never see our baby. I can’t, I thought, with the frantic desperation I’d felt as a teenager, all those years ago. I can’t.

Our luggage was kept in specially built shelves along one of the closet’s shorter walls. I took a duffel bag, a simple thing made of coffee-colored leather. It took me ten minutes to fill it up with jeans and Tshirts, underwear and bras, a set of workout clothes, a pair of sneakers, a toothbrush, and a comb.

In the media room, I sat at Marcus’s desk, flipped open my laptop, and logged onto the travel site I used. There, I bought a direct flight from Philadelphia to Puerto Vallarta, leaving the next morning. A ticket from Newark to Los Angeles, leaving an hour later. From Boston to the Bahamas. From LaGuardia to Vancouver. From Hartford to Paris. My fingers flew. The telephone trilled. Fraud protection. My friends at American Express were concerned about suspicious charges. I assured them that the card was in my possession, that all of the charges were legitimate. “Is there anything else I can help you with today?” the pleasant-voiced customer service representative asked, and I told her, nicely, that I was all set.

I bought myself three more tickets — Frankfurt, London, and Lexington, Kentucky. Then I picked up my bag, hailed a cab, and slid into the backseat. “Newark airport,” I said, and started to run.