And it was a boy, though it didn’t even look human to me. Ready or not, here I come. I slipped into autopilot, nodding and listening, asking questions of the technician and then the doctor, and all the while thinking about hide-and-seek. A children’s game. Here I come.

Children need games, diversions, and food.

Constant care.

I couldn’t do this alone.

“You okay over there?” Chrissy said. It was midafternoon. I had taken her for ice cream after the appointment—she ate two chocolate cones—and drove her home. My car idled outside the Catalano residence.

“Fine. Thinking. Lots to think about.” I unlocked her door.

“I’m glad it’s a boy, you know?”

I glanced at her, my jaw tight.

“Don’t look at me that way,” I said. “I’m not about to fucking cry in front of you and lose all my man points, got it?” I smirked and she laughed, her eyes shining.

“Got it. Me neither. I have badass-girl points to protect.”

She scrubbed her face and climbed out of the car.

I watched her until she stepped into the house, and then I drove through Denver and wondered where the hell people buy baby stuff. Online, I decided. Boyish things. Solid, dark, modern furniture. A mobile of some kind. An extravagant playhouse.

Buying things, I could handle. And when the kid was old enough to read and fish and ride, I might even enjoy his company. But what to do with an infant?

Panic.

I swung by the agency and visited Pam. She hugged me like I might break and I joked that it was the gentlest she’d ever been with me.

Afterward, I wandered Denver again.

I got coffee and lurked in a used bookstore. I bought a second copy of Swann’s Way.

At last, I went home.

Home-sweet-fucking home.

I avoided the house for a while, going directly to the barn and checking on Written in Verse. She was a sweet creature. I brushed her coat and picked her hooves.

“Pretty soon I’ll be sleeping out here with you,” I said.

She rolled her eyes toward me. She’d seen a lot of me in the past two days. Hannah’s anger drove me out of the house. The stalemate between us refused to break, and I found myself seeking her out, only to confront clipped answers and quick departures. How are you? Fine. Feel like furniture shopping today? Not really. Do you want to see my garden? No.

My fucking garden: a barren rectangular patch into which I’d churned my frustration, because planting in September is pointless. I said good night to the horse and went to the garden. I stabbed at the earth with a spade. Laughable, the idea that I could nourish anything. I was a writer, not a gardener. Not a father.

“Go easy on that dirt,” Hannah said.

I stood quickly, brandishing the spade. “Hi. Hey. Didn’t hear you coming.”

She frowned and closed the gap between us. “You got some in your hair.” She brushed a clod of dirt from my hair.

Mm, she smelled good, like clover honey. She hadn’t stood this close to me since our argument, and her nearness affected me. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to look her over the way a man can look at his fiancée’s body.

“What did you get?” She pointed.

My book lay in the grass.

“Oh.” I dropped the spade. “Swann’s Way. Different translation than I’ve got.”

“I haven’t read it.” She didn’t move away from me.

“It’s a … cycle. Series-type thing.” Oh, how the tables had turned. Me, elated to get a word out of Hannah. “It’s got the perfect first line: ‘For a long time, I went to bed early.’”

She smiled and tilted her head. “Yeah.”

“It does something to you, right? The writing is dreamlike. The narrative. It moves under you. I’d kill to write like that.”

“How was Chrissy?”

“Okay. Good. I guess it’s—” God, was I about to utter the words “It’s a boy”?—“A guy.”

“A … guy?”

“Yup.” I used my superior height to its best practical use: to look way over Hannah’s head and pretend I was cooler than this baby conversation. “Everything looks fine, healthy. I took her for ice cream. She had two cones. One for the guy, evidently.”

“Ice cream.” Hannah chuckled. “That’s a thing with you Skys, huh? I wrote about it.”

“You did?”

“Yup. Chapter eleven. It’s in your in-box. My fiancé charges off to New York City”—she didn’t hesitate, though we both knew what had happened that day—“and his saintly brother Nate takes me out for ice cream, saving me from the clutches of Aunt Ella.”

Tentatively, I ran my fingers over her curls. They hung loose and fell past her shoulders, pooling in the hood of a pale blue sweatshirt.

“Well, I can’t wait to read that. And maybe my fucking brother should stop furtively taking you on dates.”

She giggled and I smiled.

“Come here.” She took my hand and led me to the side of the house, where a long bale of hay lay in the grass. A bright quilt hung over the bale. “Sit.”

“Okay…” I sat on the block of hay.

“How does it feel?”

“You want the truth?”

She nodded.

I patted the quilt. “Lumpy? And a … piece of hay is … poking me in the ass.”

Laughter burst out of Hannah. “Okay, get up, you dork. I guess they need more padding. But it looks cool, right?”