Then Came You

PART THREE. Then Came You

I don’t understand,” I said, for what felt like the sixteenth time that morning. I was sitting at a table in a conference room in my father’s office with Jeff, my father’s lawyer, at my side and my father’s baby, with her wrinkled rosebud of a face, in a car seat on the floor beside me. I could have left it—her, I reminded myself, her—at home, with the doula, but I wanted her with me as a kind of visual punctuation, a reminder to the assembled attorneys of what had happened, and the situation I was in.

On the other side of the table was Leslie Stalling, director of the Princeton Fertility Clinic, who’d brought a lawyer of her own. There was an urn of coffee, a platter of pastries, and a bowl of fruit on a table against one wall, but no one had touched any of it. Both lawyers had briefcases at their sides and legal pads in their laps, and both had set digital tape recorders out on the table. Instead of a tape recorder or a notebook, Leslie, a fit middle-aged woman with bright blond hair, a strand of pearls, and a well-cut taupe suit, had a box of tissues in her lap. She wasn’t crying, but she looked like she might start at any moment.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to me. “In all the years of operating the clinic, we’ve never had a situation like this.”

“I get that.” How could I not? She’d said that line, or some variation of it, at least a dozen times: In all my years of running the clinic, in all my years of working with infertile women, in all my years on the planet I’ve never seen a situation like this.

I believed her. Who could have even imagined a situation like this one? My father, the biological father of the baby, was dead. My stepmother, the legal mother (technically, she would become the mother as soon as she signed the baby’s birth certificate), had disappeared without bothering even to make an appearance at her beloved’s funeral or to return for her child’s birth. Which meant that, according to a document the two of them had signed that I’d never known about, I was, now that I’d consented, the guardian of my newborn half-sibling. I would be responsible for raising it. Her. Whatever. It was astonishing. One day I’d been a regular twenty-four-year-old, living in my first apartment, working at my first job, waking up, getting dressed, swiping my card through the subway turnstile, standing on a train with the swaying, iPodded worker bees, thinking about whether the guy I’d been spending all my weekends with was my boyfriend if I’d only kissed him once. . then the phone rings and there’s someone I’d never met on the other end of the line, saying that I was a mother.

It had taken me a while to realize that India was actually gone. The first clue came two days after my father’s death, when the funeral home called to tell me that no one had brought them clothes for him to wear in his coffin. “Have you heard from his wife?” I’d asked, and the receptionist said that, regrettably, they had been unable to reach her. I took the subway to their apartment. “Hey, Ricky,” I said to the day doorman, a man I’d known since I’d learned to walk in the lobby. “Have you seen Mrs. Croft around?” It still cut to call her Mrs. Croft — that was, after all, my mother’s name — but it was better than “my stepmother” or “Dad’s new sidepiece.”

“Not since the day your father passed,” he said.

I filed that away and took the elevator upstairs. The apartment was as spotless as always. The chef was wiping down the counters in the kitchen; one maid was dusting in the living room and the other was ironing sheets in the laundry room. But there was no sign of India.

In my father’s dressing room, I picked out a navy-blue suit and a red-and-gold tie, then added a white button-down shirt with his initials monogrammed at the cuff; boxer shorts and an undershirt; socks and a pair of glossy black loafers, and zipped everything into a garment bag. I had already found the picture I wanted, a shot of the five of us when Trey and Tommy and I were little and my mother was still around, posing in front of the Grand Canyon. I would tuck it in the pocket of his suit jacket, so it would be with him, wherever he was going.

I tried to find India. I called and called, leaving voice mails, sending e-mails, pestering her assistant right up until the morning of the service, at which point it was too obvious to ignore: she was gone. The minister didn’t mention it, delivering a pleasant and generic eulogy that mentioned my father’s loved ones without naming them. I sat in the front row of the church, against the hard-backed pew. Where had she gone? What was she planning? And what would happen if she didn’t come back before the baby was born?

After the service — small, just for the family — everyone came back to the apartment. Someone, probably Paul, had arranged for food and a waitstaff, strangers in white shirts and black pants or skirts discretely moving through the room holding platters or picking up empty plates and glasses. I stood by the front door, next to a girl who’d been hired to hang coats on the rolling wire coat racks my mother had bought for occasions like these — well, not like this exactly, but any time we hosted more than a few dozen people — accepting condolences and answering questions. No, we haven’t seen her. No, we’ve been unable to reach her. No, I have no idea where she went.

After enduring an hour of this, I’d gotten Tommy to take my place. Telling myself that I wasn’t snooping but investigating, I slipped into their bedroom and, then, to India’s dressing room. India had kept the dove-gray walls and the ivory carpets and crown moldings, but she’d reupholstered my mother’s zebra-print chair in pink toile and had replaced the antique gold-framed mirror with something high-tech and fancy, circled by pink-tinted bulbs. The better to see your Botox in, I thought, which was a little unfair because before she’d espoused the principles of spirituality and a vegan diet, my mom had shot her share of fillers.

I trailed my finger along the sleeves of India’s blouses, the tweeds and cottons of her skirts, the silk and wool of her sweaters. I considered the sequined and beaded evening gowns, each in its own zippered plastic bag. It would be impossible to figure out whether anything was missing. She could have packed for a long weekend or a week away or a three-week cruise that would take her from Alaska to the tropics, and I’d never be able to tell from the contents of her closet. There was simply too much stuff. Her laptop, which I found in the media room, was what told the story.

At first I’d tried to open her inbox, but it was locked and password protected, and, after it rejected MARCUS as a password, I’d quit trying. But her Internet browser opened with a single click, and she hadn’t erased her history.

“Oh my God.” I hurried back into the living room, dodging a few well-meaning aunts and cousins and my father’s assistants weeping in the corner, and found Darren, who was eating cocktail shrimp and staring out the window, down at the park.

He perked up when he saw me. “Hey, Bettina.”

“I need to show you something,” I told him, and took his hand and led him to the media room, where I’d left her laptop open.

“She bought tickets to Mexico. . and Los Angeles. . and the Bahamas. . and Vancouver. . and Paris. . and Kentucky. All the flights left four days ago.”

He cut and pasted the information and emailed it to himself. “I can call the airlines, ask if she made the flights.”

“So we’ll know where she went.”

“But not where she is. I mean, say she went to Topeka. She could have bought a ticket in the airport from there to Los Angeles. Or Paris. Or Cancun. She could be. .”

“… anywhere by now,” I said. The house phone rang. A minute later, the housekeeper, looking apologetic, was at my side.

“Missy Bettina? Sorry to interrupt, but this lady’s been calling for Mrs. Croft. She says it’s important.”

I lifted the phone to my ear. “Yes?”

That was when I first spoke to Leslie Stalling of the Princeton Fertility Clinic. She apologized for bothering me during such a difficult time. She told me she was sorry to be adding to my worry and stress. Then she said it was imperative that she get in touch with India Croft.

“You and me both, sister,” I said. Leslie Stalling sucked in her breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We haven’t seen or heard from her in days, and now I’m here at my father’s house, and I think. . it’s kind of unbelievable, really, but it’s looking like she left town.”

“Oh, dear,” Leslie Stallings said. “That’s what I was afraid of.” She paused, a little three-second break to serve as a transition between life as I’d known it, ending forever, and life with a baby beginning. Then she’d told me about the arrangements my father and India had made.

Three weeks later, Rory was born.

I’d met Annie, the surrogate, in the hospital in Pennsylvania, and was shocked that she was so young. Annie was exactly my age, although that was where the similarities ended. Annie wore a wedding ring, but when I arrived there was no husband or kids in the hospital room, just a skinny woman with a sour look on her face standing beside the bed. “I’ll give you two some privacy,” she’d said, and shut the door harder than she had to, leaving me and Annie alone.

“My sister,” said Annie. Her light-brown hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail, and her voice got higher and higher as she asked me questions. “You haven’t heard from India?” she’d asked, looking so hopeful that I felt sick when I shook my head no. The baby was in her arms, wrapped in a pink-and-blue blanket with a knitted cap pulled down over her forehead. I’d come, as Leslie had instructed, with a diaper bag packed with wipes and diapers, bottles of formula, and a brand-new car seat. “Are you going to be all right?” Annie had asked.

“I’ll be fine,” I said firmly, with much more confidence than I felt. At least I’d been around a baby somewhat recently, my niece, Violet, but the truth was that because my brother and sister-in-law had been so determined to chronicle every moment of their great adventure, setting up a Flickr account and a Facebook page, blogging about the pregnancy and the labor and, God help us all, live-Tweeting the birth, I’d ended up ignoring as much of her infancy as I could, because paying attention meant, according to Tommy, being bombarded with close-up shots of my sister-in-law’s nipples. (“Can’t I just sign up to see the baby pictures?” I’d asked, and Tommy had shaken his head and said, “Slippery slope, man.”)

“She’s a sweetheart,” said Annie, and turned her face toward the window. I could hear her sniffling. It made me feel wretched. She hadn’t done anything except what she’d been paid to do, and I couldn’t imagine how she was feeling, thinking she’d been making a baby for a happily married trophy wife and instead handing it over to the trophy wife’s twenty-four-year-old stepdaughter, who’d never had so much as a pet goldfish and who killed every plant she’d ever owned (although I hoped no one had told her that part). I put the car seat down and put one hand awkwardly on her forearm, the one that didn’t have an IV needle stuck in it.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “This was all a bit of a shock, but I’ve got plenty of resources. I’ve hired a doula, and India left all kinds of things for the baby.”

This, at least, was true. Even I had to admit that the nursery was exquisite, with a crib and an antique rocker and a rug with a pattern of flowers around its border. The dresser and the closet were both loaded with everything a very fashionable baby could possibly need. There were clothes in sizes newborn, zero to three months, and three to six months. India had arranged for a diaper service and had bought about a thousand scented aloe vera baby wipes and a wipe warmer. The white wicker toy chest was filled with stuffed animals, lambs and bears and kittens, and the bookcase was filled with fairy tales, books by Maurice Sendak, Sandra Boynton, and Dr. Seuss. There were two business cards stuck to the refrigerator, one from a pediatrician and one from a doula, both of whom, it turned out, were on standby, just waiting to be notified about the baby’s arrival. The doula turned out to be a kind of hippie-fied, glorified baby nurse, a woman from Park Slope with a wild tangle of curls and a calm, earth-mother presence who’d been hired to be on duty for the first twelve weeks of the baby’s life. The pediatrician was the woman three blocks away who’d taken care of me and my brothers when we were little.

Standing in front of the refrigerator, looking at the shopping list written out in India’s neat hand: greens and lean meats, ground turkey and fish and fresh fruit — I thought about how I’d told India I would ruin her. I didn’t know what she’d done versus what she’d paid other people to do to get ready for Rory’s arrival, but she’d done a lot, and, certainly, her preparations didn’t hint that she’d planned on bolting, or that she was using the baby as a prop, or a means to an end. But she’d left. . and no matter how pretty the nursery’s flowered curtains, how cunning the crib bumpers and the embroidered pillow reading dream time that hung from a pink-and-green ribbon on the door, no matter that she’d arranged for a doctor and a doula, the fact was, she was gone, and I was stuck.

There were a million things for me to do and read and buy and figure out. I’d need more formula. . and baby food. . and a high chair, and one of those crazy little vibrating bouncy seats that had always made Violet look like she was being electrocuted. I’d also have to find other babies for Rory to be friends with. There was, I knew, at least one woman in my dad’s building with a smallish-looking baby. We’d exchanged hellos in the elevator a few times, and while it was true that I hadn’t noticed whether her baby was a boy or a girl, I would make a point of asking the next time I saw them.

Annie wiped her eyes while I signed the papers. “You know how to work the car seat?” she asked. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” I told her I’d be fine with the car seat and that I was positive I’d be fine. I was almost out the door with the baby in my arms when she said, “Oh! My milk!”

“Pardon?”

She pointed to a scary-looking machine next to her bed. Clear tubes ran into funnel-shaped suction cups that were screwed into bottles with ounce markings on their sides. “I was going to overnight India my breast milk for the first month. Should I still do that?”

“That would be very nice.” The baby was getting heavy. I shifted her from my left arm to my right. Her head flopped back alarmingly, and I adjusted it fast, hoping Annie hadn’t seen. “Do I pay you by the bottle, or how does it work?”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to pay me anything. India set it all up. I’ve got a FedEx account. They’ll stop by in the morning with the dry-ice packs and the boxes, and you should have it every day by noon.” She reached onto the bedside table, where she had two of the little bottles, each one full and labeled with a strip of tape indicating, I supposed, the time she’d pumped it. “Here. This will get you started.”

What do you say to a woman who’s just handed you four ounces of her breast milk? One of the bottles was still warm. I shifted the baby again, trying not to cringe as I put the milk into the diaper bag. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

“Send pictures,” she said. I could tell that she was getting ready to cry again, so I quickly set the baby into the car seat, fumbled the buckles shut, and hurried to the exit, where Manuel was waiting.

That had been seven days ago, and the baby seemed to be doing well, so far. If she sensed that she was at the center of a storm, being cared for by people who were not her biological parents, she gave no indication. “She’s good-natured,” Tia the doula told me, pointing out that Rory cried only when she was hungry or wanted to be held or rocked. That might have been true. . but if it was, she was hungry or lonely for most of the time she was awake. Worse, she wasn’t cute. To my eyes, not only did she not resemble anyone in my family, but she didn’t look like she was completely through being formed. Her eyebrows were so faint they were almost invisible. She had stubby lashes, mottled pink skin, and an unfortunate case of acne. . but she was filling out a bit, losing some of her scrawniness and starting to look a little more like the plump pink babies I’d grown familiar with from diaper commercials.

I gave her car seat another gentle push with my toe, then glared across the conference table. “Why didn’t they tell me I’d be the baby’s guardian? When did they decide?” Leslie pulled a fresh tissue from the box and pressed it underneath her right eye.

“They made their decision months ago. I don’t know why they didn’t tell you. We certainly urge our clients to be as forthcoming as possible about the arrangements they’ve put in place.”

“Our guess,” said her lawyer, stepping in smoothly, “is that they would have let you know after the baby was born. Maybe they would have made you its godmother, and at that point they would have initiated a discussion about the responsibilities involved if something were to happen to them.”

“It would have been nice,” I said, “if someone had, you know, talked to me.” I sounded bratty, exactly the way Leslie and her lawyer were probably expecting I would: a poor little rich girl who’d had everything she’d ever needed, a petulant princess who didn’t want to be bothered with the lab-engineered competition.

“I should let you know that you won’t have any concerns financially,” said Jeff, flipping through a sheaf of documents he’d pulled from his briefcase. “Your father had a very generous life insurance policy, with specific bequests set aside for you, your brothers, your niece, and this, um, new addition.” He went through the specifics of what the baby would be entitled to once the will was probated, which I wrote down without really hearing. I was still stunned, sitting there in a skirt and heels and the green sweater I’d worn because it had been the first thing I’d grabbed, and bare legs, only one of which it appeared I’d remembered to shave.

From underneath the table, the baby gave a little squeak. I rocked her again, bending down to brush the top of her head with my fingertips. “Who was the egg donor?”

Leslie and her lawyer exchanged a glance “That’s confidential,” said the lawyer.

“I’m the guardian,” I shot back. “Don’t I have a right to know what I’m dealing with? Genetically speaking?”

Another glance. I exhaled loudly, letting Leslie and her lawyer know that I was getting sick of their making eyes at each other. Finally Leslie said, “India and your father chose our anonymous donation option. They never met their donor. All they had was her profile.”

“Well, I’d like to meet her.” I wasn’t sure that this was true. What I did know was that I wanted everything I could get out of the clinic, every apology, every bit of discomfort and hard work. God knew they’d made my life hard enough.

“I suppose. .” Leslie began, “we could contact the donor, maybe give her some sense of the, um, change in arrangements. She could agree to let us give you her contact information, but it would be entirely up to her.”

“Why don’t you do that.” I paused for a moment, gathering myself. “There’s no chance. .” I said, and snuck a guilty look down into the car seat, worried, irrationally, that the baby would overhear me and take offense. “There’s no chance that this custody arrangement was a mistake? They wanted me, not my brother?”

Without any hesitation both lawyers, plus Leslie, shook their heads. “We’re here for you,” said Leslie, managing to sound sincere. “Whatever support we can provide, in any capacity. We can be a resource, if you need a nanny, or any other kind of help. .”

I shook my head and got to my feet, lifting the handle of the car seat and struggling to get my purse over my shoulder. “We’ll be fine,” I said, and then, with the car seat banging against my leg and the cup of coffee I’d poured myself in my free hand, I walked out the door and into my father’s office, and set the baby’s seat down on the floor. Someone had been cleaning. There were cardboard boxes on the mostly empty shelves, filled with photographs, the tin cup with the picture of the Eiffel Tower that I’d bought him from my junior-year trip to Paris, the finger paintings that Violet had done. I sat on top of the empty desk. His chair was gone, and I’m sure the place had been vacuumed and dusted since his death, but I imagined, sitting at his desk with my coffee beside me, looking out over the city, that I could still smell him, could feel his presence, here in the place where he’d spent so many intensely focused hours. “Now what?” I asked. No answer came. I missed my father terribly, felt his absence like a stitch in my side, a pain that never left me. In the car seat, Rory was sleeping, her chin slumped on her chest, a ribbon of drool securing her Petit Bateau sweater to her cheek, the slightly scaly surface of the bald spot on the back of her head exposed. A wave of pity rose inside me. Poor thing, I thought. Poor little thing with no parents to love her, and she’s not even pretty.

“It’s you and me, kid,” I said. Rory, of course, didn’t answer.

I took the elevator down to the ground floor. Manuel was waiting at the curb. I hefted the car seat inside, sighing with relief when I set it down. The baby barely weighed ten pounds, and the seat couldn’t weigh much more, but carrying it felt like having a lead bowling ball shackled to my wrist. It took me a minute to loop the seat belt through the back of the car seat and click it shut. As soon as we started moving, Rory’s eyes opened and she smacked her lips together, a move that I’d already figured out was a prelude to crying. I found the bottle of breast milk, shook it, uncapped it, and plugged it into her mouth. My phone rang, and I pulled it out of my purse, still hoping that maybe it was my mother, who’d come to her senses and was calling to say she’d come home.

It wasn’t my mother. It was Annie.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said as Rory batted the bottle out of her mouth. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“We’re fine,” I said. As if to disprove me, Rory started to wail. I popped the bottle between her lips again, but Rory turned her head. The nipple stabbed her in the cheek. Milk leaked out, pooling in the crease of her neck. I tried to wipe it away with my sleeve as the bottle fell out of the car seat and onto the floor, just out of my reach.

“Did the milk come this morning?”

“I’m not sure. We had an appointment. I got a box yesterday…”

Rory was turning an alarming shade of purple. Her mouth was open, but no sound was coming out, even though she was shaking with what I guessed was indignation. Was this normal? As soon as I got off the phone I could go online to the websites I’d bookmarked, look up crying and shaking and purple and see what the experts had to say. “Can you hold on for just a moment?”

I put the phone down on top of the baby, bent, grabbed the bottle, and popped it back in her mouth. This time, she started sucking. I exhaled, realizing that I was sweating. I wiped my forehead against my shoulder and used one hand to keep the bottle in the baby’s mouth and the other to bring the phone back to my ear. “Okay. I’m back. Sorry about that.”

Annie sounded faintly amused. “Listen. I know you’ve got a baby nurse, but I’d be happy to come up and help out for a few days. It would save a lot on the cost of shipping my milk.”

Honestly, I did not care about how much the milk-shipping was costing. God knows I’d never see the bill. But the idea of another set of hands, hands belonging to the woman who’d carried Rory for nine months and might, theoretically, have some idea of what she wanted when she started shaking and turning purple, sounded wonderful. “How soon can you be here?” I asked.

“Tonight?” she asked.

“Perfect,” I said, and hung up before she could change her mind.

Tia met me in the lobby, where she wrinkled her nose and diagnosed the problem. “I think she pooped.”

“Ah.” Upstairs, the mess was startling, both in color and in quantity. I stood by the nursery door, trying not to cringe, as Tia wiped off Rory’s legs and bottom, applied diaper cream, fastened a fresh diaper in place, and put the baby into a fresh outfit. Her formerly peony-pink pants were a yellow-brown ruin; even the car seat had gotten splattered. Tia whisked everything away and, somehow, I ended up in the rocking chair, with the baby in my arms. When she fell asleep I sat there, too terrified to move, until Tia came back and eased the baby into the wicker bassinet.

Five hours later, Annie arrived. For someone who’d just given birth, she looked remarkably normal, in khaki cargo pants and a T-shirt and sneakers, with a wheeled suitcase in one hand, a cooler balanced on top of it, and her breast pump packed in a carrying case and slung over her shoulder. By then I was feeling foolish. Annie had caught me at a bad moment, but I was managing just fine. Now I knew that silent scream and turning purple and not hungry meant pooping, and I was sorry to have wasted her time. But as soon as Annie took Rory out of my arms and cradled the baby against her, I changed my mind. Everything she did, the way she held the baby, jiggling her gently up and down, the way she patted her bottom in a way that even I found soothing; the way she knew, instinctively, to support Rory’s neck, made her look like an expert, and made me feel like the rankest of amateurs.

She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Why don’t you take a break?” I looked down at myself. I was still in the same green top and blue skirt I’d worn to the meeting on Wall Street that morning, and I hadn’t showered before I’d put them on. I went to my bedroom and shucked off my clothing. I’ll take a shower, I told myself. I’ll call Darren, see if he’s tracked India down. I’ll call Tommy, ask if he wants to come visit, and Trey. . and then, before I knew it, I was facedown on my bed. When I opened my eyes again it was ten o’clock at night.

I scrambled into the shower, then into a pair of sweatpants one of my brothers had left behind and an old T-shirt of my father’s. Annie was on the living-room couch, the baby asleep in her arms, the television tuned to an episode of Real Housewives. She turned around, looking guilty, and turned the TV off when she saw me.

“Tia’s having her dinner. I nursed her,” she said.

“Rory, not Tia, right?”

Annie looked too worried to smile at my attempt at a joke. “I hope that’s okay. I probably should have asked you first…”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

“… but you were sleeping, and it just seemed silly to pump it and then feed it to her, so I just…”

“Really, it’s okay.”

“She’s an angel,” said Annie, gazing fondly at the baby. I looked to see if Rory had undergone some sort of transformation during my nap, but she was the same, wrinkly and red and bald and disagreeable-looking, even in a very sweet white-and-pink one-piece outfit with a matching hat. “Here.” Annie lifted the baby, holding her out to me. Before I could think about it, I shook my head. I braced myself for rolled eyes or laughter, or, worse, disgust, but Annie just said, “I remember when I had Frank Junior. I felt like I was babysitting. I think I spent the entire first year of his life waiting for his real parents to come get him.”

At her mention of her son, I realized I had no idea what she’d done with her children. “They’re staying with my parents,” she told me. “My folks know what’s going on, and I’m fine to stay for a few days.”

I took a seat on the couch beside her. “Did you always know you wanted kids?”

Annie looked thoughtful. “I guess I always knew I’d have them. But that’s not exactly the same thing, is it?” I shook my head as she continued. “That was just what everyone I knew did. My mother, my aunts, my cousins. . everyone had babies, and most of them ended up raising a baby or two that wasn’t even their own.” She looked at me. “Did you always know you wanted to go to college?”

I considered before answering. “I guess it’s the same thing. It’s what everyone I knew did.”

She nodded. “It’s not so bad, though, is it? I mean, you had fun in college, right?”

Because it was late, because I was still foggy from my nap, because, in the past weeks, my life had changed so radically that I barely recognized it anymore, I told her the truth. “Not so much. Not really. I’m not even sure I know how to have fun.”

Annie looked at me, startled. “Really? Huh. I always thought. . I mean, if you had money. .” Her voice trailed off.

“Money can’t buy you social skills. Or friends.”

“True.” She sat quietly, maybe thinking that, in some respects, she was richer than I’d ever be. Rory started to stir, stretching and waving her fists in the air. “Want to hold her?” Annie asked. She handed over the baby, and this time, I took her. Rory opened her tiny, toothless mouth and yawned before settling herself against me. “Cute,” I said, and meant it. It wasn’t great, but maybe it was a start.

Once you’re done with school, summer doesn’t mean what it used to. Every day was a workday, and the only way the seasons mattered was whether it was light when I left for the office and when I came home, and what I’d wear from Kimmie’s apartment to the subway. Once I was at work, time and weather disappeared. The office seemed to generate its own climate, hot and humid, the air thick with stress and gray with unhappiness. In an effort to recognize summer as summer, Kimmie and I would try to eat outdoors once every week. We’d take turns picking the spot: bistros with sidewalk seating, pocket parks, museum courtyards, restaurants with backyard gardens where we could sit and imagine we were someplace other than New York.

This week, we’d grabbed street food and were dining on the benches outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was hazy and warm, the sky a washed-out white, the trees thick with glossy green leaves, a Friday afternoon, which meant that Rajit was probably halfway to the Hamptons already, and I wouldn’t be missed as long as I stayed late enough to finish my research (today’s enthralling topic — a sneaker factory in Paraguay). People had kicked off their shoes and rolled up their sleeves and pants legs (and, in the cases of some of the girls, their shirts) in an effort to make the most of the sunshine.

I bought a plate of halal chicken and rice. Kimmie had a container of fruit salad, a big bottle of water, and a black-and-white cookie. We spread napkins over our laps, traded plastic silverware, and split the cookie so that we each got black and white.

“We should go to the beach,” I said. “I’ll bet Florida’s cheap right now.”

“I bet Florida’s hot.”

“No hotter than this,” I said.

Kimmie speared a bite of kiwi and held it out to me. I looked around to make sure no one was looking, then ate the kiwi off her fork. “JetBlue’s got good deals.” She held out a chunk of pineapple. I looked around again and, when I noticed a trio of guys in ties staring at us, pulled away. Her sigh was so soft I almost didn’t hear it.

Since that first night — the night we played show and tell, as I called it — we’d spent almost every night together. I still paid rent on my apartment, and my roommates thought I had a serious boyfriend. I wasn’t in a hurry to disabuse them. It was none of their business. Kimmie and I woke up together, snuggled on her futon, and made tea in her tiny kitchen. We showered together, hip to hip in her narrow tub, washing each other’s hair under the spray. She’d sleep in my Tshirts, which fell to her thighs, and we wore beaded bracelets we’d picked up at the Brooklyn Flea, but we didn’t hold hands in public, let alone kiss. When we’d visited her parents for Christmas, they put us in Kimmie’s room, which had a single bed, and spread blankets and a sleeping bag on the floor for me. We’d spooned in the bed, whispering and giggling as Kimmie’s mother rattled around in the kitchen, preparing lasagna, the most American dish she knew.

When we were together, at dinner, at the movies, or strolling through a store or a street fair, we looked like best friends. I wasn’t sure what I was — if I was gay, if I’d always been attracted to women and had never managed to figure it out. All I knew for sure was that I was in love with Kimmie. With her, I felt safe in a way I hadn’t in years, maybe not ever, and certainly not since my father’s accident. She was so small, so fragile, with her little bird bones. I could span both of her wrists with one of my hands, could buy clothing for her at Gap Kids, but she was stronger than she looked; smart, and fierce. When she got a cold, I bought her Theraflu and Gatorade and chicken soup from the deli. When I lost my wallet, she called my credit-card company and figured out how to get the DMV to FedEx me a replacement license overnight.

On the bench Kimmie ate the pineapple herself, then pressed her lips together. I wanted to pull the elastic out of her hair, to bury my hands in its cool silk. If she were a boy I wouldn’t have thought twice. I used to rub my palm against the smooth skin on the back of Dan’s neck after he got his hair cut. I’d sit on his lap in his eating club’s common room and carry on conversations as if he were an anthropomorphized chair. I wasn’t wild about public displays of affection, but I wasn’t averse to a little hand-holding, an arm around a waist or over my shoulders, a kiss hello or goodbye. Kimmie and I didn’t do any of that. We couldn’t, without people labeling and judging. . and even in a city as big as Manhattan, where there were plenty of gay men and women, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of publicly declaring that I was one of them. Given my long hair, my high heels, the skirts and blouses and makeup I wore to work, people gave me the benefit of the doubt. They gave it to Kimmie, too, I figured, if they stopped to think of her as sexual at all. With her clothes on, she still looked more like a little boy than a woman. With her clothes off. . I gave a little shiver, thinking of it.

“You know I love you,” I said. My voice was low.

She touched my cheek. I felt myself tense. Women touch each other this way, I told myself. They do it all the time. But, out of the corner of my eye, I saw, or thought I saw, that the guys in ties were staring. They’d been joined by a construction worker in workboots and khaki pants white with drywall dust. He was holding a falafel folded in his hand, and he was definitely looking at us, staring like we were a porno movie that had just started playing, one that he could hardly wait to rewatch alone, in private.

I pulled away, faster than I’d meant to. Kimmie got to her feet. I stood up, reaching for her, wanting to touch her hair or her hand, barely managing to make contact with one bare shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She nodded, sighing. “Sure you are. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Is this what it’s going to be like, our whole life? Always hiding, always afraid someone’s going to see?”

I lowered my voice. “We’re not hiding. We’re just not, you know, taking out a billboard.”

“So are we just going to lie to everyone, about what we are? Tell everyone that we’re friends?”

Her cheeks were flushed. I wanted so badly to hold her. . and I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. It was as if I were paralyzed, frozen with shame. Back at work, after the funeral, when people had asked what had happened with my father, I’d said, heart attack, and told myself that it was the truth. His heart had stopped. True, it had stopped after he’d done an unknown quantity of street drugs. But that was nobody’s business but mine.

I tried that line with Kimmie, hoping it would soothe her. “Look. You know I love you. But what we do, what we are to each other…”

“So we hide.” Her voice was flat. She bent and, with staccato jerks of her arms, began picking up our trash.

“So… I’ll see you tonight? At home?” Had I ever called her place “home” before? I didn’t know. But it felt like home. I could picture every part of it: the glass Coke bottle with a single gerbera daisy on the windowsill next to her futon; the two-burner stove that Kimmie wiped down every time after we’d cooked something, the yellow teapot and the cups from Chinatown that she kept on a shelf we’d hammered into the wall.

Kimmie picked up her backpack and slung it over her shoulders. She paused, and it felt like my heart stopped beating before she gave a curt nod and walked away.

I watched her go. The three guys with ties walked down the sidewalk, laughing. A cloud blew across the sun. The construction worker balled up his trash, tossed it in the bin, then came and sat beside me.

“Fight with your girlfriend?”

I turned, bracing myself for the leer, the salacious smile, but saw, instead, mild blue eyes that held nothing but sympathy. For a second, I wondered whether all the people I’d been afraid of, the ones I’d thought would judge me — my coworkers, my former classmates, my horrible boss — had someone in their lives, a cousin or a sister or a daughter, who was gay. Or maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe he’d just meant “girlfriend” in the most innocent way, a friend who was a girl.

“I’m not as brave as she is,” I said, in a low voice.

He nodded. Then he hitched up his sagging pants and walked off, another New Yorker, just minding his own business. I went back to the office and sat behind my computer, ignoring the deadline on the latest pitch book, ignoring Rajit, who called on speakerphone from the Jitney to the Hamptons and berated me for mistakes actual and imagined. At night, I plodded home, bought a take-out salad, then sat at the half-size table in the kitchen, poking at it, afraid to call Kimmie or go to her apartment, the place where I belonged.

“What’s up with you?” Amanda asked.

“Bad day at work.” There was vodka in the freezer, grapefruit juice in the fridge. I mixed myself a drink, glugged it down like medicine, then lay on my bed for the first time in weeks, wondering what I was supposed to do now.

I’d just closed my eyes when Amanda knocked on my door. “You’re blowing up,” she said, holding out the BlackBerry I’d left in the kitchen. Hoping it might be Kimmie, I lifted the receiver to my ear. “Hello?”

The voice was crisp, and it took me a minute to recognize it. “Julie? It’s Leslie Stalling from the Princeton Fertility Clinic.”

“Yes?”

“Well,” Leslie began. She gave a nervous chuckle. “I can’t say I’ve ever had a conversation quite like this before. Let me start at the beginning. Your egg was used by a couple in New York City.”

My heart sped up. Hadn’t part of me always known it would happen this way, that I’d end up in the same city as the baby?

“The biological father died.”

“What?” I sat frozen as Leslie explained the rest of it — father dead, intended mother missing, twentysomething half sister left in charge. “She asked for your information,” Leslie concluded. “We can’t give that out, of course, but. .”

“What’s her name?”

Leslie told me — name, address, email, phone numbers. Which left me with only one more question. “The baby?”

Her voice warmed. “She’s gorgeous. A beautiful little girl.”

Bettina Croft was waiting for me in the lobby of her apartment building on Central Park West. She shook my hand, led me to the elevator, and pressed the button for “Penthouse.” “We’ll talk upstairs,” she said. The elevator whizzed upward, giving me time to study her. She was about my age, in a scoop-necked black linen dress and black patent-leather slides: all of it simple and, I guessed, all expensive, too. Her only jewelry was a diamond circle pin at her collar. Her thick auburn hair was pushed back from her face by a black velvet headband, the way I bet she’d been wearing it since sixth grade. She was prettier than she’d looked in the picture I’d Googled on the way over. Her lips were thin, her chin a shade pointy, her teeth too big for her mouth. But her eyebrows were elegantly arched, her eyes wide and expressive beneath them, and she had beautiful skin, cream tinged with pink at her cheeks.

The elevator chimed. The doors slid open, and we stepped into a foyer, then into a living room as airy and high-ceilinged as a basketball court. Multicolored rugs glowed on the hardwood floors and important art hung on the walls. Vases and bowls full of fresh-cut, beautifully arranged flowers ornamented every corner and there was something astonishing to see everywhere I turned. I walked to the windows, past a glass vase filled with flowering cherry blossoms and a framed Picasso hanging on the wall like it didn’t know it wasn’t in a museum. Looking out over the twinkling lights and the treetops of Central Park, I wished that Kimmie was with me. She’d appreciate this apartment, she’d notice things I didn’t, she’d hold my hand while we talked about it on her futon — how many bedrooms did we think it had, and how many people worked to clean it, and how much did it cost to live in a place like this.

“So what can I do for you?” I asked.

Bettina sat on a long, curving couch upholstered in a shimmery fabric somewhere between silver and beige, and studied me, as frankly as Jared Baker had long ago in the mall. “Figures. You’re exactly the type India would go for.”

“What do you mean?”

Bettina flipped one hand in my direction. “Tall. Blond. Gorgeous. Smart.” Somehow, she managed to make all of those words sound like insults. “What’d you play, field hockey? And you were in Cap, I bet.”

“I played field hockey and lacrosse, but only in high school. And I wasn’t in Cap.”

She lifted her plucked eyebrows. “You got hosed at bicker?”

This was insider lingo. “Cap” was Cap and Gown, one of the most selective eating clubs. Bicker was like rush, and getting hosed was Princeton parlance for getting rejected. “I wasn’t in a club. Did you go to Princeton?”

She shook her head, adjusting her headband. “My dad did. And my uncles, and my oldest brother. But I spent enough time around the campus to know what it’s like. Why weren’t you in an eating club?”

“Because I couldn’t afford it.” Her thin eyebrows arched even higher. I wondered why she was surprised. Did she imagine that girls like her, in apartments like this, were the ones selling their eggs?

“I was hoping you could tell me about yourself.” She reached into the purse she’d kept slung over her shoulder and pulled out a notebook and a pen. “Any health issues in your family? Do you happen to know your blood type?”

I knew it from the tests the clinic had done. . which meant that Bettina probably knew it, too. “O negative,” I said, wondering when she’d get around to asking me what she really wanted to know. I was still struggling to make sense of what I’d learned — that her father, the baby’s father, was dead, and that his wife, the baby’s mother, was gone.

“And your family history? Cancer? Diabetes? Heart disease?”

My unease was solidifying into anger. “The clinic can tell you about that,” I said, sitting back in my chair and crossing my arms against my chest.

“Mental illness? Substance abuse?” She sat back, skinny legs crossed, staring at me.

“Google?” I answered back.

“If anyone in your family had an issue with substance abuse,” she said sweetly, “I think that’s something you might have mentioned before donating an egg.”

She was right, of course. She was right, and I’d been wrong. “I needed the money,” I said, dropping my eyes and wishing, once more, for Kimmie.

“For what?”

“For my dad.” My eyes were stinging. “To get him into rehab. Which didn’t work, as I’m sure you already know.”

“You shouldn’t have lied.”

“I didn’t lie. Nobody at the clinic ever asked.”

“Well, don’t you think it was something you should have mentioned?” Her voice was getting louder. I got to my feet.

“Did you bring me up here just to insult me? Because I could have just stayed at work and had my boss do that.”

She surprised me by changing the subject. “Where do you work?”

“Steinman Cox. I’m a junior analyst.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Yeah,” I said sourly. “It’s spectacular.”

She sighed, finally looking her age. “I’m sorry I was provoking you,” she said. “This whole thing’s just very new.”

“So why did you want to meet me? Because it sounds like you know all the important stuff already.”

“I just wanted to see you in person. To meet you, before I asked.”

“Asked what?”

She shifted on the couch, recrossing her legs. “This is probably going to sound crazy,” she said, “but I want to know if you want to be. . involved, somehow.”

I blinked at her. “Involved?”

“Like… oh, I don’t know. An aunt, or a friend of the family.” She looked at me, her eyes wide, an expression that was almost pleading on her face. “My dad’s gone. .” She paused, then cleared her throat. “My dad’s gone, and my stepmother took off, and good riddance, as far as I’m concerned, but this baby’s got me as a parent, and I don’t know what I’m doing. So I thought…”

“You want people,” I said, remembering my conversation with Kimmie; my dream of being a mysterious benefactor.

“A village,” Bettina agreed. “You know, ‘it takes a village’? So I thought. . I mean, it’s probably crazy. You agreed to sell an egg, it’s not like you wanted to be a mother.”

I interrupted. “Can I see her?”

“She’s sleeping,” said Bettina. I thought this was a refusal until she added, “Take your shoes off and come with me.”

I did, then followed her as she led me down a hall and eased open a paneled door with a tiny embroidered pillow on a pink silk ribbon that read dream time hanging from the cut-glass doorknob. “Her name is Rory,” said Bettina, and eased the door open.

The nursery was lovely, all cream and pale pink and celery green. A white-noise machine broadcast the sound of waves and seagulls from one corner; a humidifier purred in another. Bettina tiptoed over the carpet to a crib in the center of the room. . and there, in the center, with a pink blanket pulled up to her chin, lay the baby. She was sleeping on her back, her head turned to the side, arms stretched above her head like she was signaling a touchdown.

“Oh,” I sighed. She had a few wisps of blond hair, eyebrows like gold, and a dimple in the cheek that I could see. The same dimple I had; the one I’d inherited from my father.

The thing about bad decisions is that they don’t feel like bad decisions when you’re making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable.

After I left the apartment, I took a cab to Newark Airport, went to the United kiosk, and printed out my ticket for Paris. I endured the pat-down at security, walked to the gate, and spent an hour browsing in the duty-free shop, long enough for the security cameras to get some good shots of me. Then, bending over my purse, exclaiming as though I’d left something — my wallet! my passport! — at home, I walked briskly back down the hallway, out of the airport, into the gray afternoon. It wasn’t like it was my baby, I told myself as I walked. Not really. True, it was Marcus’s sperm, but Marcus’s sperm had also made Tommy and Trey and Bettina, and it wasn’t like I was close with any of them. Not mine, not mine, not mine, I thought, climbing on board a bus.

The bus took me into Manhattan to the Port Authority, which was noisy and crowded, smelling of fast food and urine and bus exhaust. Buses were pulling in from Dallas and Kansas City, from Topeka and Toledo, from Pittsburgh and Tallahassee and all points in between. Fresh-faced girls with bags over their shoulders and their best boots on their feet were stepping into the terminal, getting their first look at New York City, planning how they’d conquer it without thinking for an instant that they’d fail; that, someday, they might find themselves forty-three years old, with a stranger’s face and all of their bright plans in ruin.

Marcus kept cash at home, five thousand dollars in a box in the safe. I’d helped myself to all of it and zipped it into the various pockets of my wallet and purse. Another bus took me to Philadelphia, and a train brought me to that city’s airport, where I picked up a ticket at the US Air counter and caught a late flight to Puerto Vallarta. When we landed, I bought a bus ticket for thirty pesos to Sayulita, a forty-five minute ride away. Sayulita, according to the Internet, was a little fishing village now famous for its surfing and its yoga, a place where you could still find a cheap place to stay, eat fresh fruit and handmade tortillas, and sip batidas by the beach. It looked pretty in the pictures that my handheld pulled up. Pretty, and a good place to hide. My rudimentary Spanish, a lot of gesturing, and a fistful of pesos got me a casita for a month — one room, with a kitchenette in the corner and mosquito netting around the bed. There was a toilet inside and a shower, with half-height wooden walls, attached to the side of the house, underneath an orange tree. Lemon trees in the backyard, I heard my mother say. I could remember the feel of her hand in my hair, the warmth of her body in bed next to me. When the sun goes down you can watch the surfers.

I lay my bag down on the bed. I was back to where I’d started. Take away the banana and the banyan trees, the sound of the waves, the tortilla truck that made its way up the cobblestones every morning, edging past the street dogs and the chickens, and I could have been back in West Hollywood, eighteen and broke, with no idea of what to do next.

I’d bought a few things at a market near the airport: a cotton wrap, a bathing suit, big sunglasses, a canvas tote bag that said VISIT MEXICO in curvy red letters, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. In my cottage, I put my clothes on the wire hangers some other visitor had left behind, set my toiletries on the little table underneath a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe next to the sink, pulled on the swimsuit, wrapped the pareo around my waist, slid a pair of two-dollar rubber flipflops on my feet, looped my tote bag over my shoulder, and walked into town.

In a market that opened onto the street I bought a net bag and filled it with eggs, cheese, tortillas, mangos, an avocado, a sun-warmed tomato that felt ripe and heavy in my hand, bottled water, and sunscreen. I walked home slowly, doing a lap around the village square. There was a church in one corner, a stained-glass Madonna with downcast eyes in its window. Across the way was a yoga studio, and sitting on benches, or on the curbstones that divided the street from the green, were the men that I knew I’d find, the ones with shabby clothes and sly expressions who lived in any resort town by the sea, the men who’d find the tourists what they wanted. Missy, hey, missy, you want smoke? Pretty lady, you want to party?

There were three farmacias that I passed on my rounds. I went inside to the smallest one. An ancient man, brown and gnarled as a walnut, stood behind the counter, sadly polishing his glasses. I put my hands against my temples, then laid them on my heart. “Dolor. Muy malo. No. .” Shit. What was Spanish for sleep? “No dormir. Ayúdame.” At first, he pulled a bottle of some over-the-counter remedy off the shelf and held it out to me, a question on his face. I shook my head, then opened my wallet, letting him see the credit cards, the fat stack of pesos. “Más fuerte. El dolor, muy malo. I lost. .” I made my arms into a cradle, rocking an invisible infant. The man looked up at me, then held up one stubby finger. “Un momento, señora.” Then he shuffled behind the counter and came back with an unmarked brown prescription bottle, into which he solemnly tapped thirty pills from a white envelope in his hand. “For the sleeping,” he said. “Very strong, so cuidado.” I nodded, paid him, and slipped the bottle into my pocket. Now I had what I needed: sunshine, sand and waves, food and water, a bed to sleep in, a town where no one would know me, and something to still the voice in my head that shrilled and mewled like a petulant teenager’s: I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I’d wake up in the morning with the sunrise. The way the roosters crowed in the cobbled streets, it was hard to sleep later than that. I’d fry an egg, slide it onto a tortilla, add a few slices of avocado and tomato, a sprinkle of salt, and take it onto my porch to eat. I’d wash the pan and my plate, pull on my swimsuit, take my tote bag, my sunscreen, and the towel that I’d hung on a tree branch to dry, and walk to the beach, a wide curve of golden sand that sloped gently toward the water. There, I’d rent a lounge chair for five pesos a day. There were bars where the beach joined the sidewalk, places that sold beer and bottled water and hand-patted tortillas filled with whatever you wanted for lunch. I’d leave my bag on the chair, slip my key, on a length of twine, around my wrist, and swim out into the clear green water. Sometimes I’d swim out even farther, until the people on the beach were no bigger than colored dots. More often, I’d flip onto my back and lie there, borne up by the gentle waves, staring into the sun.

As the weeks unspooled, I got to know people’s faces, if not their names: the surfing instructors who’d paddle their long-boards past me; the young woman with the gold incisor who worked at the café where I’d order my juice or enchiladas; the man, missing most of the fingers on his left hand, who rented the beach chairs; the little girl with glossy black pigtails who followed him with a tiny rake to smooth the sand. My own hair started growing in, dark at the roots, with a few springy strands of gray. I kept it braided, tucked up underneath my hat, and I wore sunglasses that covered my face from my eyebrows to my cheeks.

One day my after-lunch ramble took me to a hotel lobby. There were a few decent-size hotels in Sayulita, inexpensive places that catered to kids from Europe on their gap year, backpackers and free spirits and families who’d decided that bare-bones quarters with shared bathrooms was a fair exchange for the gorgeous beaches, the fresh fruit, the quaint streets with their little shops and the men who’d sit in the square at night, playing sad love songs on their guitars. The hotels had computers, usually an elderly desktop perched on top of a folding table in the lobby, where you could rent time online.

I’d ditched my iPhone in the ladies’ room at the airport in Philadelphia, sliding it into a trash can without a second look, even though I’d felt a momentary pang about the leather cover, monogrammed, soft as butter. Now I brushed my salt-water-stiffened hair off my cheeks and thumped the keys on a wheezing, overheating Dell, logging into my e-mail for the first time since I’d left, opening a screen so I could Google my name.

There it was. First, a column in the Post about how I’d missed the funeral. Then, three days later, the story I knew someone would find eventually. It was in the Daily News, illustrated with my mug shot, from when I was twenty-three, and another picture of me as a teenager, at a party, in a Flashdance-style sweatshirt, ripped at the shoulder. “Runaway Bride Was Bigamist.”

“Here we go,” I muttered, and clicked on the link. India Bishop, the new wife-turned-widow of recently deceased financier Marcus Croft, who raised eyebrows across the city after she was a no-show at her husband’s funeral on Friday, changed her name when she moved to Hollywood as a teenager. No surprise: it’s a move many young aspiring actresses make. But when Bishop filled out the paperwork that would legally turn her from Samantha Marie Stavros to India Bishop, she never mentioned that she’d been married as a teenager, and that she’d never obtained a divorce. Bishop, 43 (not the 38 she’s been claiming), a public-relations executive, was wed in 1985 to David Carter, a substitute drama teacher at New London High School in New London, Connecticut, who was more than fifteen years’ Bishop’s senior at the time. “It was a major scandal,” said Andrea LeBlanc, a classmate of Bishop’s. “We all figured she was pregnant, but, if she was, she wasn’t showing by graduation. . and, by August, she was gone.”

Bishop left New London and moved to Hollywood, where she worked odd jobs and was eventually arrested in a round-up of women who were working as waitresses at a party and charged with prostitution (she was eventually released, and the charges were dropped). Two years later, she was hired at JMS Public Relations under her new name.

I gripped the edges of the table, my stomach clenching, thinking that if there was any consolation to be found, it was that Marcus had died before he’d found out the truth — that I’d filed papers, but David, it seemed, had never signed them and, even decades after the fact, I had still been married to David Carter when Marcus and I had said our vows. I forced my eyes back to the screen, scanning to the bottom to read the story’s final line. Reached in his New London home, David Carter declined to comment.

I bent my head, imagining the story being zapped around the city, landing with a cheery little chirp in the inboxes of everyone I knew. I pictured Bettina’s smirk. Then I forced myself to look at my inbox. There were dozens of e-mails from Annie — the last one, under “subject,” read PLEASE CALL ME! I’M WORRIED! Another few dozen from Leslie at the clinic, saying basically the same thing. Bettina had written: Where Are You? More spam, more reporters; a note from my saleslady at Saks, who, apparently unaware of the changes in my life, wrote to say that the new Jimmy Choo open-toed leather lace-up booties had arrived and were available in dark brown and black, and she would hold a pair in both colors until she heard from me. Finally there was one more e-mail from Bettina. Nothing in the subject line, just a picture of a baby with dark eyes and a jaunty pink beret over her head. “It’s a girl,” she’d written. Nothing more.

I logged out, picked up my bag, and walked into the sunshine. Hey, lady, hey, lady, the men on the square crooned. Back at my casita, I shucked off my swimsuit and stood under the water from the outdoor shower until it went from tepid to cold. I didn’t bother drying off. I lay naked underneath the single sheet, with mosquitoes whining against the netting, until the sun went down, and slept until almost noon the next day. . and when I woke up, I knew where to go, and what to do when I got there.

By July, things had calmed down enough that I felt able to leave the apartment for a while. Annie was staying two days and one night each week, Tia was on duty every night Monday through Friday, and Jules, who I thought I’d never see again after our uncomfortable introduction, had surprised me by calling the week after we’d met and volunteering to babysit. “I don’t know much about kids,” she said, looking as terrified as I must have been the first time I gave her Rory to hold.

“It’s not hard,” I’d said. She’d handled the baby like she was made of glass, exclaiming over her every sigh and coo. The first Sunday I’d stayed with her. The second time I’d left her with bottles of breast milk and my cell-phone number and gotten on the subway to spend an evening with Darren for the first time since Rory’s arrival. Unbeknownst to him, I had an agenda: I wanted to get drunk, and then, as my old roommate would have put it, I wanted to get laid. I wanted to behave like a regular twenty-four-year-old, a woman with no vision past her own eyelashes, no plans beyond the next day, and no responsibilities beyond her own job.

Darren lived in Chelsea, in a building with an elevator but no doorman and disconcertingly narrow hallways. His apartment had, as I could have predicted, a flat-screen TV as its main piece of furniture, but other than that, it was surprisingly un-repulsive. There was an indigo-and-orange vintage poster for Orangina on the kitchen wall and a big leather couch in the living/dining room. There was no space for a kitchen table, but Darren had lined up three wood-and-metal stools in front of the narrow breakfast bar. When I arrived, he was unpacking a bag full of Chinese take-out boxes. There was fried rice and egg rolls, chicken lo mein and spicy prawns. I filled my plate, and we sat together on the couch.

“So?” asked Darren. “How’s motherhood?” He was barefoot in his chinos, wearing a T-shirt advertising some band I’d never heard of, and his horrible glasses. He needed a haircut. . but, to me, he’d never looked cuter.

“It’s interesting,” I said carefully. I understood the problem, the situation I was in. When Darren and I had started spending time together, I was single and unencumbered. Now I had a baby. The fact that the baby was not technically mine did not, in the end, matter much. I was a woman with a child, and that did not make me more desirable than I’d been when we’d met.

“Any word from India?” he asked.

I shook my head. The truth was, I wasn’t looking for my disappearing stepmother too hard. With Annie and Jules and Tia in and out of the apartment, with the baby doing baby-like things that are probably boring to everyone in the world except for the people to whom the baby belongs—She smiled! She almost rolled over! She’s holding up her head! — I felt interested, engaged, needed in a way I didn’t think I’d never been needed in my life, and if, sometimes, I was so tired it was all I could do to keep from dozing off in the tub, if I missed my colleagues at Kohler’s, if I missed my freedom, it seemed a reasonable trade-off for a life I liked much better than the one I’d had. I had a tribe, a crew, friends in Annie and Tia and Jules. The baby, too, had grown on me. I’d even started posting cute pictures on my Facebook page.

“So what do you think will happen?” Darren asked.

“I don’t know.” In truth, I thought that what would happen had happened already: Rory had been born, I’d brought her home, and now I would raise her. But, for Darren’s sake, I was willing to play along with the idea that things could still change. “I could put her up for adoption. I could sell her on eBay. Billionaire’s baby. I bet I could get a nice price.”

“I don’t think,” Darren said, “that eBay’s allowed to traffic in actual people.”

I looked at him hopefully. “Craigslist?”

He shook his head. I pushed a single sesame noodle around the edge of my plate, where it had already completed half a dozen laps, like it was training for a noodle marathon. Since my father’s death, I’d lost eleven pounds. I was a grown-up, I told myself to shake off the memories of my dad. I was a grown woman with a college degree and a job I could return to, a baby I was caring for, maybe even a boyfriend, and so what if my life wasn’t perfect? Whose life was? Lots of people missed their parents, plenty of people had it worse. Jules had told me only the barest contours of her story, and that was plenty for me to be horrified. Still, I couldn’t keep from imagining it: my dad, walking through my bedroom door the way he had when I was little and had bad dreams. He’d bring me a glass of water, escort me to and from the bathroom, then sit with me, watching over me, my canopied bed creaking under his weight, until I fell asleep again.

“I can’t figure out why they picked me,” I said. “Why me, and not Trey and Marissa?” They had a baby, they had baby stuff, they had a nanny already, not to mention an apartment that was big enough to accommodate another. My father had bought them the place as a wedding gift.

“Maybe your father thought they had their hands full,” Darren offered. I nodded, wondering if that was it, or if maybe he thought that a new baby wouldn’t be as well loved as Trey and Marissa’s own daughter. “Or maybe India was the one who picked you.”

I winced. “Doubt it. We didn’t get along.”

He used his chopsticks to help himself to more prawns. “Yes, I sensed that when you came to have her investigated.”

My cheeks flushed. “I wasn’t wrong about India.”

“You weren’t wrong about her past,” Darren said. “I just wonder if maybe she’d changed. Anyhow,” he said hastily as I opened my mouth to tell him that, clearly, India hadn’t changed a bit, that she was a user and a gold digger who’d killed my father and abandoned her child and more or less ruined my life. “Is the food okay? You’re not eating.”

I popped a snow pea in my mouth. “It’s fine.”

“If you want my opinion, I think India made the right choice with you.”

“You think I’m the maternal type?” That, at least, would explain why he’d never done more than kiss me.

“I think,” he said, “they probably wanted the baby to have all the advantages that you guys had. Which means…”

“Money,” I concluded.

“Not just money. Living in New York City. Being exposed to things. Art, theater…”

“The homeless guy I saw pooping in a trash can in the subway station this morning…”

“No kidding,” said Darren. “Your subway station has one of those guys, too?”

I looked around his kitchen. There was a coffee machine, a stainless-steel blender, a gallon-size container of protein powder beside it, and a toaster oven in the corner, but no liquor. I needed liquor. Booze was part of my plan. I wanted to be a party girl, laughing, half naked, letting a stranger slurp tequila out of my belly button without thinking about germs or disease. I wanted to be naked, skin to skin, with this boy I liked. “Do you have anything to drink?”

He swung open the refrigerator. “We’ve got water, light beer, orange juice. .” He gave the plastic container a swish, then held it up to the light, squinting, before opening the top to take a sniff. “Maybe not orange juice.”

“I mean, drink drink.” I slid off my stool and started going through his cabinets. The first one held only three dinner-size plates, two cereal bowls, two glasses, and two mismatched coffee mugs. The second featured an assortment of canned soups and pasta. I held one up. “Beefaroni?”

“Don’t knock it,” he said.

The third cupboard yielded a bottle of whiskey. I took one of his two glasses, pried a few cubes out of an ancient, ice-crusted metal tray I found in the freezer, poured myself a shot, and gulped it down.

My eyes watered, and I felt my face turn red. “Whoa.” I filled my glass again as Darren watched, frowning.

I sipped my second drink, and took off my shoes, and pulled my hair out of its headband, shaking it free. “Are you worried about me?”

“Should I be?”

I gave my hair another shake and downed my second shot. The mouth of the whiskey bottle clanked against the lip of the glass as I poured a refill. Darren put his hand over mine.

“Hey. Seriously. Easy there.”

I shook him off, put the glass to my mouth and knocked it back. My head was fuzzy, but it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, and my chest and belly felt warm. Darren was watching me from the sofa. Even in his dorky glasses, he looked delicious, all broad shoulders and solid thighs, with his face slightly sunburned from an afternoon playing Frisbee in the park and his hair flopping over his eyebrows. Without planning, without thinking, I crossed the room, straddled his legs, and kissed him. He made a noise like “mmph,” his hands stiff at his sides and his lips motionless against mine. For a second, I was certain that I’d misread the signs, that he’d push me away, gently but firmly, and tell me our single kiss had been an act of kindness rather than a romantic overture, and that, while he’d always be my friend and would occasionally be my employee, he just didn’t think of me that way.

Then he slid one hand around the back of my neck, pulling me closer. He stood, lifting me in his arms, cradling me, and I closed my eyes, feeling warm and drunk and, for an instant, dizzy with guilt. Why should I be enjoying this, enjoying anything, with my own father barely cold in his grave, with a baby at home, needing my care? But as Darren held me against his chest, I felt comforted and safe.

“Do you need to make a Franklin list?” I asked, pulling off his glasses and tossing them, harder than perhaps was technically necessary, onto the coffee table.

“Huh?”

“Pros and cons. Run the numbers.”

“Pipe down, nugget,” he said. He carried me into his bedroom and tossed me on the bed, which was made up with a dark-blue bedspread and a pair of pillows in striped blue-and-white pillowcases. I bounced, and giggled convincingly, like I’d been doing it all my life. Then he was lying on top of me, his chest crushing my breasts, his hips pressing against mine. The air rushed out of my body and, with it, my grief, and for the next little while I forgot everything that had happened, and all of my responsibilities, and everything but the feeling of the two of us together.

• • •

When it was over, I leaned over and kissed the narrow bridge of his nose. “That was something,” I said.

“Uh.” He was lying on his side, naked, sweating, adorable. His hair was messy, and his face, without those terrible glasses, looked younger and softer and altogether lovable. My boyfriend, I thought, and it was all I could do not to hold myself, to jump out of the bed and go singing into the streets. Lying beside him, still slightly tipsy, the world felt reordered, and the tasks ahead of me felt manageable. Maybe I could convince Annie to stay long-term. I could even invite her husband and her sons. There was room for them all. I could help her husband find a job. Maybe Jules would find child care so enjoyable that she’d end up being like an aunt to Rory, coming over once or twice a week. We’d be a tribe, a team, a village. . us and our men.

I poked Darren’s freckled shoulder until I was sure I had his attention. “Do you like kids?” I asked.

He opened his eyes and peered at me. “For dinner?”

“Ha.” I rummaged under the covers until I located my panties. I’d need new panties, if someone was going to be seeing them on a regular basis. I’d have to add it to the list. “Get all the jokes out of your system now. Because if you’re going to be a father…”

Now both his eyes were open. “What?”

“Well, a stepfather. A step-boyfriend-father.” The whiskey had made me merry, like one of those laughing girls I’d always watched with my mouth pressed in a disapproving line. Who knew it was this easy, to find a new personality in a bottle?

“Wait. Wait.” He was blinking at me, holding the sheets to his chest. “Slow down for a minute here.”

I perched on the bed in my underpants, legs tucked underneath me and tilted coquettishly to the side.

“Look,” he said, sitting up and holding me by the shoulders. “I like you, Tina. I like you a lot. But. . I mean, the thing is…”

I jumped off the bed before he could say any more, before he could elucidate the reasons he didn’t want me. I scooped up whatever clothes I saw on the floor, feeling dizzy as I bent over, and hurried into the bathroom. Wrong, I thought. I’d been right about India, but I’d been wrong about him.

A second later, he was banging on the door. “Hey, Bettina. Can we talk about this?”

I decided that we couldn’t. . because, really, what was there to say? “I need to go.” I combed my fingers through my hair, washed my hands and face, rinsed my mouth with water, and opened the door, pushing past him to where I’d left my shoes. Darren had pulled on his boxer shorts. His hair stood up in spikes, and his face still had that tender look without his glasses. He touched my cheek, then my hair. “Stay with me.”

Are you my boyfriend? I wanted to ask. . but the words reminded me of a book I’d read when I was little. Are you my mother? The mess of my life came crashing down, leaving me breathless. My father was dead, my mother was gone, and I was responsible for a baby who wasn’t mine. It seemed, in that moment, more than I could bear, more than anyone should have to.

I pressed my lips against his shoulder. “I need to go.” I kissed his cheek, then the corner of his mouth, thinking that he wouldn’t try to keep me, so I was surprised when he took my shoulders and held me motionless in front of him.

“Hey. Listen.” He paused, scratching at the top of his head. “I don’t know if I like babies. I’ve never really thought about it. I wasn’t expecting to have to think about it for a while, you know?”

I nodded. I knew.

“But, the thing is, I like you. I like you a lot.” My heart was rising, rising. I wanted to jump in the air, or into his arms again. “It’s like, if I found out you had, I don’t know, herpes or something.”

My heart stopped rising. My mouth fell open. “Are you actually equating my half sister with a venereal disease?” I asked.

Darren picked up his glasses off the coffee table, put them on, and looked at me defiantly. “You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“It’s like…” He scratched at his head some more, thinking. “A preexisting condition,” he finally said. “I’ll deal with it. Whatever it is.” He opened his arms. “Now come to papa.”

And, almost in spite of myself, I went.

When I was seventeen, my junior year of high school, my grandfather had a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side.

My yaya tried to find the right kind of facility, a place with round-the-clock nurses and physical therapy, and aides who could help lift my grandfather from his bed to his wheelchair, then from the chair to the toilet or the shower. But insurance only paid for six months at a place like that. When the time was up, my grandfather came home, where he’d fly into rages, face red, spittle in the corners of his lips, glaring at my grandmother in frustration, or in tears. Why can’t, why can’t, was the phrase he’d repeat over and over, as she’d tell him, in Greek and in English, Vassily, calm down! He couldn’t be left alone: unattended, he’d throw things, start fires when he turned on the stove and then forgot about it.

For six weeks we managed. In the mornings, we’d work together to get him to the bathroom, shaved and dressed and into his chair. My grandmother would stay with him while I was at school. I turned down my starring role in the drama club’s fall musical so I could come home as soon as school ended. I’d sit with him, watching television or reading out loud while she ran errands or napped. We’d eat dinner early, perform the bathroom routine again, and then watch TV until it was time to get him in bed. We kept this up until the morning my grandfather fell on top of my grandmother while I was at school. After an hour, she managed to work herself out from underneath him (my grandfather was almost six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds) and inch her way across the kitchen floor to the phone. The ambulance she called took them both to the hospital. She’d cracked three of her ribs and he’d broken a hip.

“I don’t want to do this,” Yaya said, wincing as she spoke and pressing her hand against her taped-up ribs. “But I have no choice.” She put the house up for sale, moved the two of them into an assisted-living complex where no one under fifty-five was allowed, and gave me the last address she had for my mother, on Alden Lane in New London, Connecticut. Sure, Raine had said, when Yaya had called her. Sure, Sammie can come. Absolutely. It’s time we were together. But I’d been listening on the extension, and my mother had not sounded enthusiastic. I could hear noises in the background — kids fighting, a television blaring, a man yelling something I couldn’t make out. She’d gotten married years ago, to a man named Phil, and they had two daughters, ages seven and five. She had never ended up in California — New London was about as far away from there as you could get.

I left Toledo in October with five hundred dollars, a suitcase full of clothes, a pair of boots and a pair of sneakers, and a winter coat that I’d outgrown (I hadn’t wanted to bother Yaya and ask for another one). In spite of all the indications, I was hopeful. I hadn’t seen my mother in years, but I remembered her as young and beautiful, always laughing, with a light in her eyes, so different from my dour, exhausted grandmother.

But the woman who opened the door after my ten-hour bus ride was different. I blinked, thinking maybe I’d gotten the address wrong, looking at the woman’s hard-worn face and faded eyes, her hair dyed a brassy, straw-like blonde, and her body still thin, but soft as overripe fruit.

“Sammie?” Her voice was hoarse. There was a cigarette burning between her fingers, and I could see that her teeth were stained. I wondered if she still had the unicorn tattooed on her hip, if she remembered telling me she’d take me to California, and if she ever felt bad that she hadn’t.

Her husband wasn’t there. Phil was, I learned, a long-distance trucker who made cross-country runs that kept him on the road ten days out of every two weeks. Raine worked, part-time, as a cashier at a supermarket. “This is going to be just fine,” she said, ushering me into the house, which smelled like bacon grease and cigarette smoke, showing me the pullout couch where I’d sleep and the closet where I could keep my things. It probably did seem like a good deal to her: a built-in, live-in babysitter for her daughters from the moment I came home from school. Usually, she’d barely bother to say hello to me as I got off the bus before racing out the door, into her car, and, I eventually learned, off to one of the Indian casinos just a few miles up the highway.

The girls — Emmie and Sophie — were sweet enough, with big brown eyes and curly brown hair. I’d babysat some, back in Toledo, and I liked kids all right. I’d walk them home from their elementary school, help them hang up their backpacks, and fix them a snack. We’d play games: Veterinarian, where we’d treat Sophie’s ailing teddy bears; Doctor, where I’d pretend that my leg hurt and the girls, giggling, would decide that the only remedy was an immediate amputation. We’d play Sorry and Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, and then, at five o’clock, watch Sesame Street. At six, I’d fix them dinners of macaroni and cheese or hot dogs and sweet pickles. I’d give them their baths and put them to bed before starting on my own homework. It wasn’t perfect, and Raine was not what I’d expected or hoped for, but I could get through it until I finished high school and figured out my next move.

The first time my stepfather crawled into bed with me he said it was a mistake. He explained this to me over breakfast the next morning, clutching his coffee cup, looking straight into my eyes. “Sometimes, when I’m coming in late, your mom makes up that pullout bed for me. When I saw the bed made up, that’s what I thought. I didn’t even notice you there.” He smiled. His teeth were worse than Raine’s had gotten. “Skinny little thing like you.”

Phil was a lean, bald man with crinkles in the corners of his muddy brown eyes. He smelled like the tobacco he chewed, and when he came home after ten days away, he pushed his daughters away like they were pigs swarming at a trough. Run upstairs now. Let Daddy talk to your big sister, he’d say, with his eyes moving over me, like I was another cheap piece of furniture filling his living room, something he’d bought and paid for.

The second time he slapped his hand over my mouth and ripped off my panties before I kneed him in the stomach and wriggled away. Standing on the edge of the bed, panting, my nose running, and my knee bruised from the metal bar on the side of the bed, I’d yelled at him, loud enough that there was no way my mother could not have heard: If you touch me again, you fucking bastard, I swear to God I’ll cut it off. He’d rolled off me and staggered away, clutching himself. Raine never came to my rescue. She never came at all.

The next morning, my mother, holding her cigarettes in one hand and her lighter in the other, sat me down at the breakfast table and mumbled, “I don’t think this is going to work.”

I sat there, hardly believing what I was hearing. I’d told her what had happened, but she didn’t believe me. . or, worse, maybe she did believe me, and she was taking his side anyhow.

“Phil’s got a bad temper, but I know he didn’t mean anything.”

My voice sounded like it was coming from outer space. “He put his hand down my underpants. I’m pretty sure he knew what that meant.”

Raine winced, then lit a cigarette. “He got confused,” she said weakly. Then she glared at me. “And it’s not like he asked for another kid. A teenager, for God’s sake. He’s got his hands full, you know.”

“So where am I supposed to go?”

She didn’t answer. I got to my feet, picked up my bookbag, then pulled my suitcase out of the closet and started to fill it with the few things I’d brought with me from Ohio. Stop me, I thought. Tell me you love me, tell me to stay. She didn’t. Instead, she gave me the keys to her car, an ancient Tercel. “Maybe you can stay with some friends for a while. Like a sleepover.” I didn’t tell her that sleepovers were for little girls; that I hadn’t been at New London High School long enough to make any friends, and I couldn’t go back to Toledo. How could I tell people that my own mother hadn’t wanted me, that, between the two of us, she’d chosen Phil?

I spent three nights at the Days Inn and then, realizing that I couldn’t pay for a fourth night, I started sleeping in Raine’s car, which I parked in the far reaches of the high school’s lot. I’d catch a few fitful hours of rest each night curled under piles of clothing in the backseat, praying that no one would find me. Salvation arrived just before Thanksgiving, in my theater class.

I’d signed up for theater because I’d loved it back home, where my voice and my looks had gotten me plum parts in every musical. In New London, the teacher was Mrs. Rusk, a sixty-year-old battle-axe with dyed red hair and the requisite complement of oversized gestures and affectations, but she’d taken medical leave in late October after her breast cancer came back. She left, bidding us a teary farewell and quoting King Lear’s speech to his daughters, on a Friday. On Monday morning, after Raine had kicked me out, I took my seat in the school’s theater and sat, transfixed, as a man stepped out of the wings and onto the stage, then beckoned for us to join him.

“Might as well get comfortable up here,” he said. “Names?” We went around a circle, saying our names, listening as he repeated them.

David Carter was in his thirties, still good-looking enough that the girls would check him out when he stood onstage to deliver a monologue, or ran lines with us, playing Romeo to our Juliet, Stanley to our Blanche.

He’d gone to New London High, then NYU. He’d been the understudy for the Phantom, and acted in an off-Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. He kept a coffeepot plugged in on his desk — against school rules, probably, but a theater instructor, an actor, could get away with certain eccentricities. In the mornings, he’d pour me a cup — half scalding black coffee, half cream — and I’d hold it gratefully, letting the mug warm my skin. I wasn’t sure if he knew that I hadn’t had breakfast and, most days, I hadn’t had dinner, either, but those cups of milky coffee were the first of many kindnesses.

Being homeless as a teenager wasn’t as hard as it probably was for adults who didn’t have access to a high school. I’d get to school early, ostensibly to use the gym, and I’d shower in the locker room and brush my teeth at the sink. I could wash my clothes at the Laundromat. I was probably eligible for free lunches, had Raine taken the time to apply, but there was always food around the school, if you knew where to look for it: leftover birthday cake in the teachers’ lounge, bags of pretzels that the anorexics-in-training would toss, still mostly full, into the trash bins in the girls’ rooms. I’d pocket apples and bananas and jars of peanut butter at the grocery store, and slip string cheese and packages of crackers and gum into my pockets at the gas station.

The tricky part was finding a safe place to spend the nights. I’d rotate my spots, moving from the parking lot at the high school to the one behind the public library to the one at the Y. Twice, in the middle of the night, once at the high school and once at the end of a dirt road, the cops had pulled up, shining their lights through the Tercel’s windows. It had been a different cop each time, but I’d told them both the same story: that I’d had a fight with my mother.

“Go on home,” said the officer who’d found me the last time. “Whatever they did to you, no matter how mad they are, your folks wouldn’t want you sleeping out here alone. It’s not safe.”

In November, I came to class one day to find a winter coat, brand-new, pink nylon with a pale-pink lining, hanging from the back of my chair. “I bought it for my sister, but she didn’t like it. On sale, so it can’t go back. Can you use it?” David asked. Later, I learned that he didn’t have a sister. He’d seen me shivering in the parking lot wearing both of my sweaters at once, and had guessed, correctly, that I didn’t have a coat.

It took him weeks to earn my trust, weeks of treats and compliments: a waxed paper bag of doughnuts waiting on my chair, a coupon for buy-one-get-one-free pizza from the shop in town tucked into my Ten Monologues book, a sweater that he told me he’d shrunk in the wash. Later, he said that getting me to talk was like coaxing a feral cat in from the cold. Little Cat, he called me, and he told me that he’d loved me the first time he’d seen me, all legs and big eyes, “and those tights you had, remember them? The ones with the hole in the knee.”

He never touched me for all that time, except for a light hand on my wrist or the small of my back when he was directing a scene. . but, the way he looked at me, I knew there were possibilities. I had just turned eighteen, had only had a few boyfriends, and was still learning my own power, the way boys would follow me with their eyes, the things I could get them to do. Now I was starting to wonder whether a man might be the answer to my problems.

One night at the end of November, when it was getting dark by four-thirty p.m. and the nights were getting cold, I walked to David’s classroom and leaned against the door. I wore a thin white blouse, my ripped black tights, a black Spandex skirt that ended at the tops of my thighs, the Doc Martens I’d convinced Yaya to buy me the year before. He looked at me and his face lit up, and I knew that the thing I wanted — a warm place to sleep, an actual bed — was mine for the taking.

So I stood in the classroom doorway, each rib visible underneath my skin and my nipples poking out against my shirt, and I let him take me to his place, an apartment that took up the whole second floor of an old Victorian downtown. There, I let him give me half a glass of tart red wine and then, by the flickering light of a half-dozen candles, I undressed myself while he stared up at me from his bed and lay on top of him and kissed him until he groaned and rolled on top of me, taking me in his arms. Three weeks after the first time we’d slept together, he resigned from the school. No big deal, he told me; he had a little family money. The next day we drove to a justice of the peace after school on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, and became man and wife.

I finished school, at David’s insistence, and it wasn’t half the scandal you might imagine. For a week I was the subject of scrutiny and jokes — my history teacher, I remember, took great delight in addressing me as Mrs. Carter, and the girls all wanted to see my ring — a tiny solitaire on a band of gold — but there were two girls who were pregnant in my class, plus a boy widely suspected of being gay, and it wasn’t long before people lost interest in the oddity of a married woman attending high school, especially once it was clear that I wasn’t pregnant.

Another teacher was hired; and David got a job at a small theater in Hartford, as part of the company, and teaching drama to little kids on Saturday. After classes I’d walk to our apartment, stopping at the grocery store with the list David had given me in the morning to pick up whatever he needed for dinner, and the money he’d given me to buy it. Upstairs, I’d lock the door behind me and pour a glass of wine — an adult pleasure that I’d quickly adopted — and settle on the green velvet couch with my homework, or one of the novels or plays from David’s shelves. The nights he didn’t have shows, he’d be home by five-thirty. “My child bride,” he’d say, gathering me into his arms. I’d pour him his own wine, and sometimes we’d go right to bed and make love, but, more often, he’d go to the kitchen to cook. I’d perch on the counter and watch him chop onions, sauté garlic, swirl a melting knob of butter into the pan. “I’ve got to fatten you up,” he would say. He’d scoop pasta into my bowl, grating drifts of Parmesan on top, and keep jars of olives and wedges of cheese around for me to nibble at.

We’d eat, then read together or listen to music from David’s collection of classical and opera albums. On Saturday afternoons, we’d go to the library, filling bags with books and compact discs. On Monday nights, when the theater was dark, we’d go out to dinner and then to a movie, and on Sunday mornings we’d buy the New York Times, take our clothes to the Laundromat, buy doughnuts and coffee, and sit in the molded plastic chairs attached to the wall, reading the paper, snacking, then folding our fresh, dried sheets and pillowcases together. Maybe it was an oddly sedate life for a teenager — most of my peers back in Toledo, I knew, were spending their Saturdays at parties in fields or parks or in houses where the parents weren’t home, and I could only assume that my classmates in New London were doing the same things — but, after all those years with my exhausted, emotionless grandparents, after being rejected by my mother and spending all those cold nights in my car, our routines and traditions were comforting.

The hardest part was seeing Raine around town. I glimpsed her once at the supermarket, a different one from the one where she worked. She looked tired and frail in her winter coat, snapping as Sophie and Emma tried to sneak a box of Lucky Charms into the shopping cart, and I’d hidden behind a stand-up display of Entenmann’s cookies until they passed. Once, coming back from the Laundromat with a basket of clean clothes, I saw her and Phil and the girls on their way into church. That time there’d been nowhere to hide. The girls hadn’t seen me, but Raine did, and she looked at me like I was a babysitter whose name she couldn’t quite remember, a sitter she’d used once and never intended to hire again.

I graduated in June. David didn’t attend the ceremony, but he was there, waiting for me outside the high school in his car, which was an immaculately kept baby-blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible that he’d inherited from his father and kept in a garage, dressed in a custom-made zippered canvas cover. We went home. He made pasta. We made love, which, while not the rapture the movies and novels had taught me to expect, was at least pleasant enough. In September I planned to start taking classes at UConn. I would study theater and art history, like David had. In August, I found out I was pregnant.

To this day, I can remember the feeling of it, the sundress I’d been wearing, the taste of milk and Cheerios still in my mouth. I can feel the black-and-white tiles of the bathroom floor cool under my feet, and I can see the claw-footed tub with the rust stain around the drain in front of me, the pregnancy test, with its pink plus sign, jiggling up and down in my shaking hand. We’d been using condoms… except a few times, when David would slip inside me for a few strokes without one. This is the end, I thought. The end of everything. Marriage was one thing, but if I had a baby, I’d be stuck in New London for the rest of my life. Even though I had no particular ambition, no idea of where else I’d want to go, what else I’d want to do, I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. David had been an escape hatch, not a lifetime plan, and a baby wasn’t part of my plan at all.

I waited until he went to work the next day to make the appointment at the Planned Parenthood in New Haven, an hour’s drive away. I took money out of the bank — and, I’m ashamed to say, out of his wallet. I drove the Tercel my mother had given me to the clinic, and, when it was over, I bought a bottle of Advil and a bottle of water and just kept driving west. As the miles slid by, the year that I’d endured — my grandfather’s stroke, my trip from Toledo to New London, my brief time with Raine, then the car, then David, had all started to feel like it had happened to someone else. Someone else had slept in the cramped backseat of the car; someone else had gotten married in front of a justice of the peace with bad breath and a wandering eye; someone else had gotten that abortion and woken up alone, a curly-haired, kind-eyed nurse handing her a sanitary pad and asking whether there was anyone waiting to take her home.

In Los Angeles, I bought a driver’s license with a fake name and a birthday that made me twenty-one. Eventually, I lived so long as that girl, India Bishop, that I almost forgot I’d ever been anyone else; a girl whose mother hadn’t wanted her, a girl who’d stolen food and slept in a car, a girl who’d left a husband behind.

My plane landed in LaGuardia just as night was falling. I bought a new cell phone and spent the night in a hotel. In the morning I cabbed it to Grand Central and bought a ticket for the train that would take me to New London for the first time since I’d left David, all those years ago. The trip was only a few hours, through the soupy, humid August air. Kids had opened a fire hydrant on the corner and it was dribbling water into the gutter. In the park in the center of town, teenage girls in bikinis lay on towels, and mothers with babies pushed strollers back and forth in the shade.

David’s apartment was an easy walk from the station. The front door to the old Victorian, long since divided into one-and two-bedroom flats, was supposed to be locked, but it hadn’t been when I’d known him, and it wasn’t now. The stairs had been stripped of the green carpet I remembered, and now the wood of the walls had a mellow gleam. The banister had been refinished, and the walls were painted a pretty cream color, and the ceramic Virgin was where I remembered her, in the little nook at the top of the stairs.

I knocked at the door, and he swung it open and looked at me for a minute, staring blankly. I had to remind myself that I had a different face now. He might not even recognize me. David looked older, heavier, tired around the eyes. His hair — what was left of it — was white, and he wore glasses, which were new, and a white cotton button-down shirt, untucked, and worn corduroy pants. There was a gold wedding band, the one we’d bought together or its twin, on his left hand, and, as I stood in the hallway that smelled like soup, listening to an air conditioner whine and someone’s TV play the nightly news, he smiled at me. His face lit up and he looked handsome again; handsome and as young as he’d been when we were together. “Well,” he said. “Look who’s here.”

It was cool inside. That was the first thing I noticed as David took my Mexico tote bag and set it by the door. “Can I get you anything to drink? I’ve got a nice Scotch,” he said, gesturing toward a bar cart made of wrought iron and mirrored panels. I looked around, remembering: the Turkish rugs he’d layered over the hardwood floors, the colorful abstract paintings on the walls, the green velvet couch, the art books and novels and old vinyl albums lined alphabetically on handmade shelves that stretched from the floor to the top of the twelve-foot ceiling, with a rolling wooden ladder in the corner. I thought back to when I was eighteen and thought this was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. We’d made love, and I’d waited until he’d fallen asleep, then crept out of his bed and ate everything in his refrigerator, including an entire jar of strawberry jam.

“Just some water, please.”

He handed me a jelly glass filled from a filter-pitcher. I sat down on the couch and cupped the cool glass in my hands, letting him look me over. “What,” he asked me pleasantly, “did you do to yourself?”

I managed a little laugh. “It’s been a while, you know.”

“You were so beautiful,” David said. “Why would you want to change?”

I shrugged.

“Sammie.” He reached out and touched my hair.

“I got married again.” The words came out in a croak. “In New York. An older man.”

He had moved to stand behind me. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined that he was smiling. “Sounds like you’ve got a type.”

“You know,” I said, without turning, without looking at him, “we never got divorced.”

His hand moved slowly in my hair. “I got the papers you sent, and I know I should have signed them. I knew you weren’t coming back. But I never did. I just kept hoping. .” His hand was on my shoulder now. “Are you happy?” he asked.

Eyes closed, I whispered, “For a while, I was.”

“Did you ever think of me?”

“Sometimes.” It was true. In Los Angeles, when I was broke and lonely, getting rejected at auditions a dozen times a week, I’d think of David, who had always been unfailingly kind. I’d remember the coat he’d given me, the mugs of milky coffee, his mouth warm against the back of my neck. Little Cat, Little Cat.

“My husband and I… we were supposed to have a baby. With a surrogate.” He came to sit beside me on the couch. His eyebrows drew together as he studied me. I met his gaze, telling myself I wasn’t the girl he’d known, the girl he’d saved, the cat who’d crept out of his bed and out of his house one summer morning with all the cash in his wallet, the girl who’d sold her engagement ring at a West Hollywood pawnshop and tried to think of that brief, early marriage as the first of many skins she’d shed, the first of many selves she’d outgrow.

“About that divorce,” I said.

He sighed, nodding. “I figured someday you’d be back for that.”

“I should have done it a while ago.” The truth was, I’d hoped that sending him the papers would be enough, that he’d sign them and file them and it would all be over without my having to do a thing.

“Does it mean,” he asked, “that you’re not really married to the other guy?”

“That’s a little unclear. He’s dead now.”

“Oh.” He looked sympathetic, and I felt stabbed through with remorse. He wasn’t a bad guy, and he’d never done anything except try to help me. I had treated him poorly, and being young and mistreated myself wasn’t much of an excuse.

The papers I’d sent David, my petition for divorce, were in a drawer in the kitchen, still in the envelope I’d used to mail them. I felt my heart stutter, looking at my teenage handwriting, big and loopy, young and hopeful. I’d called a lawyer from the train that morning. In David’s apartment I called her again, and she said she’d meet us in her office in an hour. The rules, as she explained them when we arrived, were clear: I’d filed papers, but David had never signed them, which made me guilty of bigamy. “We can file for leniency,” she told us, and David had nodded. “I’ll do whatever I can to make this right.” My mind wandered while they talked. I wondered what would happen: if my marriage hadn’t been legal, then maybe Marcus couldn’t have left me anything. Maybe not even the baby was mine. I wondered, too, why David had never remarried, whether there’d been a string of teenage girls in the years since we’d parted or if maybe he was still in love with me.

Less than an hour, the lawyer had said, but by the time everything was signed and notarized it was closer to two, and then we were back out on the sticky sidewalk, underneath a low gray sky. The first hard thing was done. I was divorced. I’d made it over the hurdle. But worse was coming.

“Is my mother…”

He shook his head and took my hands. “I saw her obituary in the paper, maybe six or seven years ago.”

“Oh.” I tried to remember something good about her, the way she’d looked when she was young, how she’d smiled at me like I was the best thing she’d ever seen, the stories she’d whispered in my ear, curled up next to me in the bed that had once been hers. I knew better than to even ask about my half sisters. They’d been little girls when I’d lived here, and I didn’t think I’d ever told David their names.

He walked me to the bus stop and gave me an awkward hug. “I wish you well,” he said. “I always did.” I nodded, knowing I didn’t deserve his good wishes, knowing I couldn’t answer him without crying.

The bus pulled out of the station at six o’clock. By nine, I was back in the city. By nine-forty-five, I was walking up the five flights of stairs to my old single-girl apartment. I took off my shoes and lay on top of the narrow bed, fully dressed, without turning on the lights. Tears slid down my cheeks and pooled in my ears. Tomorrow I’d get up, get dressed, leave the last vestiges of my girlhood behind, go back to the grand apartment, and be a mother.

I’d tried calling Kimmie the night after Bettina had made her proposition, but her cell phone just rang and rang. The e-mails I sent over the next ten days went unanswered, which I knew because I was checking my BlackBerry approximately every five minutes, prompting Rajit to deliver a barrage of snide remarks about the charming new tic I’d developed.

“Did your boyfriend forget to call?” he smirked, thumbs in his suspenders, monogrammed cuffs flapping.

“My girlfriend,” I said coolly. It was out of my mouth before I’d known I was going to say it. Rajit’s mouth hung open for a gratifying instant.

“Oh, my,” he said, almost to himself. “Well. That’ll give me something to think about this weekend.” Normally I would have ignored him, but today I straightened myself to my full height, which was at least three inches more than Rajit’s.

“You’re disgusting,” I said pleasantly. “I just want you to know that. You’re a horrible human being, and I’ll bet your parents would be ashamed if they knew how you treated people.” Then I turned off my computer, shouldered my bag, and, head held high, walked out the door to a smattering of applause and a single wolf-whistle.

It was seven o’clock, still light, but getting cooler. I wondered how long it had been since I’d left the office before the sun set. Most of my colleagues wouldn’t make it home for hours. I took the subway uptown and dashed up the stairs two at a home, stationing myself in front of Kimmie’s building’s front door. I had a key, but it didn’t seem right to use it. After about twenty minutes I saw her round the corner in her black tank top, with her backpack bouncing on her narrow shoulders and her hair tucked up into a twist. I ran to meet her.

“Hey.”

She looked up, then quickly looked down and kept on walking. “Hi,” she said, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear it.

I caught up so that I was walking alongside her. I’d lost my father. I’d probably torpedoed my job. I didn’t have any real friends in the city, just colleagues and acquaintances, same as it had been in college. I’d been so lonely, lonely for years until I’d met her. I couldn’t bear the thought of being that lonely again.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I grabbed her by her upper arms, and spun her around, and kissed her.

Her backpack slipped off her shoulders. My bag fell onto the sidewalk. Somebody hooted, and someone else yelled, “Get you some!” but I didn’t care. Her lips were stiff underneath mine, but they softened as I held her.

Then she pushed me away. “What was that about?”

“I don’t want to lose you,” I said. “I couldn’t stand that. I’m sorry I’m so… so slow about these things, but I just. . I really. .” I blurted out the only thing I could think of at that moment. “There’s a baby. From my egg. The baby’s half sister got in touch with me. They’re here, in New York.”

Kimmie bent down, picking up her backpack, brushing it off before slipping it back on. Then she smiled, showing me her tiny, even teeth. “You’re making a spectacle,” she said. She squeezed my hand. “What’s the baby’s name?”

“Rory.” I walked close enough to her that our hips bumped as we made our way back toward her apartment, holding her hand, toward the tiny metal-walled elevator, the hallway that smelled like air freshener and chicken soup. The evening would unfold in its ordered, wonderful familiarity. We’d cook something, noodles and stir-fry or meatloaf and mashed potatoes. We’d spoon ice cream into mugs and snuggle on the couch, watching the shows we’d taped, and I would tell her about Bettina’s call, about the grand apartment, about the baby. In bed with her, I’d feel safe in a way I’d once been at the dining-room table with my father, working on my homework, knowing that he was there to help. I smiled, wondering what I’d done to deserve her, to deserve such happiness.

My train got into Philadelphia just after eleven o’clock in the morning. It was noisy in the echoing station, where the floors were made of marble and the ceilings soared thirty feet high. The air that August morning was still and sticky, smelling like hot pretzels from a stand set up in front of the information board. I stepped off the staircase, and there was Frank, standing next to one of the curved wooden benches, waiting for me. Instead of his work clothes, he wore a clean pair of khakis and a short-sleeved jersey shirt, with sneakers, instead of heavy workboots, on his feet. PHILADELPHIA AVIATION ACADEMY, read the logo on his shirt.

I walked toward him slowly, wondering what it meant that he was here. Normally Nancy picked me up, with the boys in the car, and took me home. The house would be clean, the bed I’d shared with Frank would be neatly made, but there would be no sign of him. We’d agreed, in a terse conversation, to keep things as normal as possible. Frank would spend time with the boys during the daytime, when he wasn’t working, and he’d stay for dinner, if he was home. Then he’d slip out once they were sleeping and go to his parents’ house for the night.

We hadn’t told the boys anything, because there didn’t seem to be much to say: we were in limbo, separated but still technically living together, married but leading separate lives. For the time being, I’d told Frank Junior and Spencer that the baby I’d had in my tummy was in New York with her parents, and that I was helping to take care of her while she was still little. They had accepted this without question or comment. I suspected that Frank Junior thought that because the baby was a girl, she would naturally require more care than he had.

Frank stood up when he saw me. “Hi,” he said shyly, looking me over as I approached him. I set my duffel bag by my feet and sat down on the bench, and he sat beside me. “You look pretty.”

I touched my hair, wondering how I really looked to him. I hadn’t gained much weight with the pregnancy — being too upset to eat for much of the third trimester had helped with that — and I was only a few pounds away from being back to where I’d been when this whole thing had started.

“Were the boys good for you?”

He grinned. “Spencer used the potty all day.”

“He did?” I was delighted. He used the potty for me, but I usually put him in a pull-up before I left for the city, and I’d assumed that’s what Frank was doing, too.

“How is the baby?” Frank asked.

“She’s beautiful. An angel.” I felt my throat thicken, a hint of the sadness that came over me when I nursed and held the baby that wasn’t really mine, that there were no daughters in my future.

“Rory,” he said. “I like that name.”

“Me, too.”

“So,” he said, and settled his hands on his legs. “You like New York?”

“It’s fine. I miss the boys when I’m away. But the money will help.” Bettina had insisted on paying me a thousand dollars for the day and night I was up there, much too much money, I told her, but she wasn’t taking no for an answer.

“I miss them, too. At night.” He pressed his lips together like he wanted to suck the words back into his mouth. Then, he said, “I miss us being a family. I miss you.”

I didn’t answer. I’d done the hardest work of my life, the thing none of the clone-girls in that story I’d read had done. I had broken free from my destiny. I had taken myself to the city, found money and a place to live. I could stay — Bettina hadn’t come right out and said it, but I knew if I offered to work as a nanny, she’d hire me, and I could bring the boys to New York and find a place for us there. I could have people like I’d had back in high school, people to talk to, to eat with. The whole world lay open before me. . and now Frank probably wanted me to turn away from it, to come home and be what I was before.

“You weren’t wrong to be upset with me,” said Frank. Startled, I turned to look at him. His eyes were narrowed, his body stiff. “I wasn’t being the husband you deserved.”

This was unexpected. “Maybe I was wrong, too,” I said.

Frank shook his head. “You were trying to help us. And if I hadn’t been so stubborn about letting you work. .” He dropped his voice until I could hardly hear him over the drone of the crowd, the noise of people coming and going. “I guess maybe you were lonely.”

I nodded, almost unconsciously. Frank kept talking. “We can sell the house, move to Philly. Spencer’s starting nursery school in the fall, so you’ll have some time. You can go to college, if you want.”

I felt a pressure inside of me building, a sob or a shout, I wasn’t sure yet. “You love that farm. It’s all you ever wanted.”

“I want you more. And I got a new job,” he said.

“With the airlines?”

“Nah. Teaching.” He took my hand. “I did so well in my classes they asked me to stay on. I’m still part-time at the airport, but it’s good money. Good benefits, too.” He paused, like he was steeling himself. “I looked it up online. Community college has classes online, or in Center City.”

I looked down at our fingers entwined. I’d thought about giving him back my engagement ring — it had cost almost two thousand dollars and was by far the most expensive thing outside of his truck that Frank had ever bought — but I hadn’t taken it off yet. I wondered if I would have made different choices, if I could have gone back in time, knowing what I knew now. Part of me thought I would have undone the surrogacy in an instant, wiped the slate clean, done anything to keep my marriage intact. Another part of me thought that I’d done just the right thing, that the pain of leaving him was the cost of a new and better life.

“Come home,” said Frank, his grip on my hand tightening. “Stay with us.”

I sat there, not answering. Rory was getting bigger, filling out, holding her head up with her clear eyes open, taking in the world. I could send breast milk by FedEx and visit the baby on the weekends. I could start taking the classes I’d planned on — an English course, and one on computer programming — but I could do them at home, online, instead of in New York. I could give my boys the world of the city, the museums and the plays and the galleries and the musicals — but keep my house, and my husband. I could have a bigger life, like Nancy, like what I’d come to want in the last few years, only I could have it with Frank. It almost seemed like too much to hope for, but I smiled at him, then reached for his cheek, pulling him close.

One Wednesday morning in early August, when I was interviewing the third nanny of the morning, the telephone rang. “Someone’s here to see you,” said Ricky, our doorman.

“Send her up,” I said, looking at my watch. If it was the fourth applicant, she was twenty minutes early, and if it was the first girl, the one who was supposed to have been here at nine, she was two hours late.

“She says she’d rather meet you in the lobby,” said Ricky. “It’s your. . it’s Mrs. Croft.”

“Excuse me,” I said to the applicant currently perched on the couch. I’d already decided not to hire her. True, her French accent was lovely, and her references were solid, but anyone who’d show up for a job interview wearing jeans with the words HOT STUFF spelled out in sequins across the back pockets was not someone I would be employing to care for a child.

I stuck my head into the nursery to make sure the baby was asleep. Then I tucked the baby monitor into my pocket, told the chef and the maids where I was going, then pressed the button for the lobby.

India was waiting for me behind the doorman’s desk. “Hello,” I said, having rejected Well, look who’s here on the way down. She was casually dressed and she was tan, which infuriated me. I imagined her lying on a beach somewhere while I’d been handling the details of her husband’s funeral and her baby’s birth. “Did you have a nice vacation?”

She didn’t take the bait. “I had some thinking to do.”

I stood there, waiting, looking her over. If she was wearing makeup, I couldn’t tell. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, and her roots were badly in need of a touch-up. I saw an inch or two of drab dark brown at her scalp before her hair made the transition to glorious caramel bronze, and there were wiry silver hairs threaded through the brown. She wore jeans — probably they were the six-hundred-dollar kind they sold at Saks, but they were still jeans — and a plain short-sleeved T-shirt. No earrings, no jewelry at all, except for her wedding ring.

“I loved your father,” she said.

“Which is why you didn’t bother showing up for his funeral.”

India flinched. “I have a hard time with. . well. I was having a hard time with all of it.”

“Oh, really? Because I thought it was a total picnic. Do you have any idea what I’ve been dealing with? Any idea at all?” I was shouting, I realized, and Ricky was staring, although he was trying not to, and so was my neighbor Mrs. Schneider, collecting her mail, with her little Yorkie riding in her purse. I took India’s arm — it was, possibly, the first time I’d touched her since a brief, obligatory hug at her wedding — and dragged her back toward the service entrance. There was no way I was letting her come upstairs.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She’d followed me willingly enough, and now she met my gaze steadily, not fidgeting or flinching. I wondered if she was on heavy-duty antidepressants, or if she’d spent the last few months sitting on a beach, hanging out in a sweat lodge, doing yoga. Maybe she’d met up with my mother in New Mexico, sampled some of the Baba’s offerings. That thought made me even angrier.

“You’re sorry. That’s great. That’s a big consolation. I got a call from your fertility clinic because your surrogate was freaking out. She hadn’t heard from you, nobody knew where you were, and, in case you were confused, having a baby is not like ordering a pizza, then deciding you’d rather have Chinese. You can’t just decide you don’t want it.”

“I know.” No ducking, no tears, no excuses. . just that same strange, narcotized steadiness. “I didn’t do the right thing. But I’m back now, and I won’t run away again.”

“I don’t believe you. Why should I believe you?”

She didn’t answer me. Instead, she asked, “Have you met Annie?”

“I have. She’s been staying here. Helping with the baby.”

This, finally, caused a crack in India’s placid exterior. She blinked rapidly. “What?”

“We didn’t know where you were. I had people looking, but we didn’t know if you’d turn up in time, and even if you did, we didn’t know if you’d want to be a mother. Annie’s been staying here, and Jules — she’s the egg donor — and her girlfriend, Kimmie — they’ve been babysitting.”

Now India was blinking even faster. “What? I don’t understand. You met the egg donor? How could that be?”

“I needed all the help I could get. Annie and Jules have been great. They wanted to help me,” I said, letting her fill in the blank of and you didn’t all by herself.

“Listen,” she said. This time she put her hand on my arm. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“You have no idea what I’m thinking.”

“You’re thinking,” she continued, “that I’m going to be a terrible mother.”

“I don’t even think you planned on being a mother at all. I think you just wanted a baby to make sure you’d inherit my father’s money. I think that’s about the worst reason for having a baby in the world. I think you’re a bigamist, and I think…”

“I think,” she said, interrupting me, “that you have no clue what my life was like.”

“You mean before or after you were arrested? Or before you married my father without bothering to get divorced?”

She almost smiled. “It wasn’t that I didn’t bother to get divorced. I served David with papers. He never signed them. And by then, I’d changed my name. .” Her voice trailed off. “You’re not entirely wrong. Money did have something to do with it. But mostly…”

She paused. I waited.

“Mostly,” she said, “I wanted your father and me to be a family. To have something that was ours. I think that’s why I couldn’t handle the funeral. Why I left. .” Now her voice was cracking. She looked away, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I couldn’t stand to think that the baby would be mine, not ours.”

“And you’d be stuck with it,” I added.

“That was part of it,” she answered. “But I figured out a lot of things while I was gone.” She smiled. “And I got divorced.”

“You know, you probably weren’t even legally married to my father. Which means you probably can’t inherit.”

She shrugged, but didn’t answer. “I don’t care about the money. I don’t expect you to believe me, but it’s true,” she said. “I came back for my baby.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe you. And, by the way, it’s not your baby, and she has a name. Rory.”

She lifted her chin. “She’s not yours. I’m the mother.”

“You don’t think,” I said, “that if I went to a judge and told him what you did, and told him what you were, that they’d give me custody?”

Instead of answering, India asked, “Do you want a baby?”

“Interesting that you’d care about that now, after you and my father decided to give me custody if something happened.”

Another faint smile flitted across her face. “Your dad always thought that you were the responsible one.”

That hurt, imagining my dad discussing me with his new wife; knowing I’d never hear him compliment me again. “I am responsible. And I’ll be responsible.” I gave her a hard look. “You should go.” I flicked my hand toward the doors, in case she’d forgotten where they were. “Go rent an apartment. Or move into a hotel. Wait for the will to be probated. You might not get it all, but I’m sure you’ll get something, and you can move to Majorca or wherever you want to go to catch your next rich husband. I can handle this.”

“I’m sure you can. That’s why your dad and I picked you. But it isn’t fair.”

She had to be kidding me. “None of this is fair!” I blurted.

“It isn’t fair,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “that you won’t get to enjoy your twenties. That you’ll be stuck taking care of a baby who isn’t yours. When your father and I chose you as the guardian, we had no idea. .” Her voice was trembling, but she made herself finish. “We had no idea this would happen. We only picked someone because the clinic said we had to, and we thought if anything happened, it wouldn’t be for years and years. It was never our intention for you to have a baby to deal with at this point in your life.” She wiped her eyes. “That’s why I left my first husband. I was pregnant, and I didn’t want to be stuck. But you probably know about that already.”

I shook my head. My inquiry into India’s affairs had revealed that she’d been raised by her grandparents, rejected by her mother, and married at eighteen, but not why she’d left her first husband. If she’d been pregnant and had an abortion, maybe that was why she wanted this baby — Rory — so badly. Not because she wanted to lock down my father and her inheritance, but to make up for the baby she hadn’t had when she was young.

I smoothed my hair again, buying time, thinking that India and I actually had more in common than I’d been willing to acknowledge. We both had mothers who’d let us down. We’d both gotten stuck with too much responsibility too soon. Of course, I’d gone to Vassar and she’d gone to a justice of the peace to marry her high-school drama teacher, but still. Minor details.

“I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, and I know you don’t like me.” She was crying in earnest now, tears streaming down her tanned cheeks, not even bothering to try to wipe them. “But I loved your dad, and I swear to you. .” She rested her hand against her heart. “I’ll do the best job I can.”

It would have been the easiest thing to say, Okay, fine, you take it from here, to tell Annie and Jules that the plans had changed, to tell Darren that my life had magically untangled itself, that I could be, again, just a regular girl, unencumbered, my nights and weekends free. Surprisingly, the thought made me sad. I liked the baby, the apartment full of women, even Annie’s little boys, the one time they’d come for the weekend. I liked feeling needed… and admired a little, too. No, that’s not her baby. It’s her half sister. Her father died before she was born, and now she’s raising her. Isn’t she amazing? More than that, I felt like I was on my way to building the thing I’d been missing after my mother left: a family of my own.

“So what do you say?” India asked. She looked at me hopefully. “Do you think you could give me a chance?”

“I think,” I said. “I think maybe the more hands, the better. I think I’ve got a good plan in place. But I think you can help.”

Her smile vanished. “Help? What do you mean? I’m going to be the mother.”

“I think that this baby is going to have a lot of mothers.”

A line between her eyes deepened as she frowned.

“Come upstairs,” I said, walking back into the lobby, giving Ricky a wave and punching the button for the elevator.

She stood behind me silently as we ascended and, without a word, followed me into the apartment, then down the hall. Rory was just starting to wake up, kicking her legs, curling and uncurling her fingers and her toes as she wriggled around. India froze in her tracks about three feet from the crib, making a noise like she’d been hit. “Oh,” she said. Her mouth was open, and I wondered what she was thinking of: my father, or the baby she hadn’t had. “Can I…”

“Fine.”

She reached into the crib and gently lifted Rory into her arms. “Hi, baby,” she whispered. “Hi, little baby. I came back for you.”

“Watch her head,” I said pointlessly. India had Rory’s head tucked into the crook of her elbow, and she was doing Annie’s little bouncing move, like she’d been born knowing it, born with that baby in her arms. I sighed, feeling the strangest mix of sorrow and relief, and I worried, for a minute, that maybe I’d start crying, too. But I had a future, my whole life ahead of me, babies of my own, if I wanted them.

She looked at me, eyes brimming, above Rory’s head. Her bald spot was gone, and in its place was a thick tuft of glossy dark hair, the same hair as my brothers, and my dad. “Thank you,” she whispered.

I could have said something snotty, like Whatever, or It wasn’t like you had a choice. But she seemed at once so broken and so happy, standing in the room she’d decorated with the baby in her arms. . and so all I said was “You’re welcome.”

I waited by the doorway outside the primary school with the rest of the first-grade moms and sitters and the single stay-at-home dad, making small talk until the bell rang and the six-year-olds, all pleated skirts and scabby knees and oversized backpacks, came racing out into the sunshine.

“Rory! Over here!” She squinted, then her face broke into a smile as she ran toward me. Her dark-brown hair had come out of its ponytail and hung in ringlets around her cheeks, and her elfin face wore its usual merry expression. It always surprised me, how I felt when I saw her, how I loved her more than I’d thought it was possible to love anyone.

She pulled up right at my side, out of breath, and shoved a folded piece of paper into my hand. “We have to do a family tree.”

I took the paper, examining it.

“See. Look.” Rory snatched back the assignment, pointing at the lines that were connected to the tree trunk. “You have to put your mother and your father and your grandmother and grandfather and brothers and sisters if you’ve got them.” She paused for a breath. “Do you know Sophie has two brothers and two sisters?” Her tone suggested that she could barely imagine such riches.

“I do know that.” I also knew that Sophie’s parents had conceived both sets of twins with the help of donor insemination and all four children had been carried by two different surrogates at the same time. Maybe Rory’s tale wouldn’t be the only strange one in the class.

My daughter slipped her hand into mine, and we started the routines of our walk home. “Candy treat?” she asked as we passed the drugstore, and I said, “Okay.”

We went through the drugstore’s automatic doors — when she’d been little, Rory had loved to hop back and forth over the threshold, determining just how far inside she’d have to be to get the doors to work — and selected a bag of M&M’s. Rory counted each coin carefully before sliding it across the counter, then skipped home along the sidewalk, singing to herself, with the candy rattling in her pocket. Upstairs, in the apartment that Marcus had left me, along with more money than I could ever hope to spend, Rory sat at the kitchen table, sorting the M&M’s by color, lining them up in rows, then eating them one at a time, first brown, then yellow, then red, then blue, and then, finally, the green ones. She practiced her recorder for ten minutes, then looked at the schedule taped to the stainless-steel refrigerator. Wednesday was her recorder lesson; on Fridays, she had tumbling. On Sunday afternoons, Jules and Kimmie came over to spend the afternoon and take her out for dinner (these days, she favored sushi). Jules and Kimmie were married now. They’d had a sunset ceremony on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard and were talking about having a baby of their own. Kimmie was doing research for a pharmacology company, and Jules had left the world of finance, gone back to school for a journalism degree, and gotten what she laughingly called the last job as an investigative reporter at the last magazine left in New York.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, Bettina came over after work for dinner, and once a month she hosted Rory at her apartment downtown. She’d gone back to work at Kohler’s and was still dating Darren, and, while I didn’t think the two of us would ever be best friends, we enjoyed each other’s company well enough when Rory brought us together.

Once a month, Rory and I made the trip to Phoenixville, where Rory would spend the weekend with Annie and Frank and Frank Junior and Spencer, who doted on her, introducing her as their sister and treating her like a doll. Like Jules, Annie had gone back to school. In another year she’d have her bachelor’s degree, and then she’d apply for teaching jobs in the same school system her boys attended.

Sometimes I worried it was confusing — all these people, all these different places, different expectations, different rules — but Rory seemed to manage it all with aplomb. She was a natural negotiator, knowing, intuitively, how to get along and play well with others. In that — in so many ways, in little gestures, in the shape of her feet and her fingers, in the way she’d press her lips together, humming while she thought — she reminded me of her father.

“Homework,” I said, and she ran to her room. The nursery had been all pale pink and green when she’d been a baby, before her true nature had revealed itself. Rory wasn’t a pink-bedroom girl, although, like all her peers, she’d undergone a brief but fervent infatuation with the Disney princesses. Now her space was outfitted with an oversize desk that held footlong plastic bins in which Rory stored her Legos, her snap circuit kit, the collection of old cell phones and calculators she’d taken apart, and plastic bins full of laboriously printed and drawn plans labeled EXPERIMINTS AND INVENSHUNS.

We still lived in the apartment in the San Giacomo, but I’d sold the bottom floor, which meant we’d been reduced — quote-unquote — to just four bedrooms: one for me, one for Rory, and two guest suites with their own bathrooms for whoever came to stay, Bettina and Darren, Annie and Frank and their boys. I’d given a lot of the art away to museums and let go of most of the staff, although I still had someone to clean, and to cook when I entertained. I’d gone back to work part-time, and I volunteered at Rory’s school, organizing fund-raising events and the annual Book and Bake Sale, raising money for the new library and the class trips to Portugual and Spain that Rory would take as an eighth-grader. I’d even made two friends, other mothers with kids in Rory’s class, one married, one single. I’d thought about dating, but hadn’t yet. Secretly, I suspected that that part of my life was over. I’d had my big love, and now, at forty-eight (although my friends told me I didn’t look a day over forty), I had memories, friends, a weird kind of family, and a daughter I loved with all my heart. . and, surely, there were worse things than that.

Rory came dashing back into the room in her favorite sparkly T-shirt (white, long-sleeved, with a sequined heart on the chest) and a pair of navy-blue Columbia sweatpants that Kimmie had given her. We sat in the kitchen, the room where Rory and I spent most of our time together. I’d moved one of the Persian rugs from the apartment I’d sold into one of the kitchen’s corners and bought a round table and four chairs, and moved my laptop from the desk in the dressing room onto the kitchen counter. Rory would do her homework at one end of the table; I’d sit, with my laptop, at the opposite end, where I would look up recipes or send out notices about fund-raisers and committee meetings, and e-mail pictures to Annie.

Rory smoothed the page on the table. She’d written her name in big capital letters in the center of the tree trunk.

“You know the story, right?”

She gave a theatrical sigh — I wasn’t sure who she’d picked that up from — and then began. “Once upon a time there was a mommy with no baby, and she wanted a baby more than anything else in the world.”

“Right you are.” This was a bit of revisionist history, but Annie was the one who’d come up with this story, the mythology of Rory’s essential beginnings, and I’d never tried to change it.

“So the mommy and the daddy found a lady to give them a seed that would become a baby, and that lady was Jules. Then the seed got planted in another lady, and that lady was my tummy mommy, and that lady was Annie.” She peered at her paper. “Where do I put ‘tummy mommy’?”

“Hmm. Why don’t we write her right next to the tree trunk.” I tapped the paper. Rory frowned. She believed in rules and could be inflexible when it came to doing things the right way, but she let me help her write “Annie” just above her own name. I wondered again why the teachers had made this assignment, why they’d sent the kids home with a family tree with spaces for mother and father but no room for alternate configurations, when, in addition to the twins-by-surrogate, at least two kids in Rory’s class had two mommies, one had two daddies, and one little girl in the second grade had parents who’d divorced their spouses and married each other, which surely made for some awkward parent-teacher conferences.

“And then my daddy died and went to heaven, where he watches over me every day.”

I nodded, swallowing hard, pointing at the spot for “father.” Annie, the most religious of us, had told Rory about Marcus, and about heaven, and I hadn’t quarreled.

“And then I was born and the mommy was sooo happy to have me, and when I got my name everyone came to give me gifts, like in the story of the princess in Sleeping Beauty. Only people, not fairies.” She waited for my nod. “Bettina gave me grace. Jules gave me. .” She chewed at her lower lip. “What’s the fancy word for smart?”

“Intelligence?”

“Right. And Annie made me happy and smiley and friendly, and you are my mom, and you give me the gift of love, and that,” she concluded, her voice rising in triumph, “that is why you named me Aurora.”

“Right,” I said, and gathered her into my arms. Bettina had been the one who’d named her, maybe knowing, or maybe just hoping, that all of us would be there for this child, like the good fairies who’d gathered around Sleeping Beauty’s crib to give her the best gifts they had. Someday, I’d tell her that, the whole story, how I’d left after her father had died and how her sister had been the one to name her. I gave her a kiss. For a moment, she resisted — she was growing up, “not a baby,” as she reminded me all the time, and she was getting too old to want to snuggle the way she used to — but at least once a day she’d let me hold her. “And we all love you. .”

“… very, very much.” Her voice was muffled, her face tucked into my shoulder. When she popped out, her eyes were bright, and she was smiling, exposing the space where she’d lost her first tooth the week before. “TV now?”

“TV,” I said, and watched her go, running off, barefoot in her sweatpants, because Rory was a girl who never walked when she could run. She had her father’s broad face and round cheeks, her sister Bettina’s thick hair, Jules’s fierce intellect and unwavering sense of right and wrong, and Annie’s sweetness and generosity. She had the best of all of us, and, as for me, I had a life that was happier than I could have imagined.