Afterwards, when Stephen asked me if I were all right, I said I was. I did not know how to tell him how it felt, being so far away — confusing, frightening, and very much alone. I could not describe to him how, even with the fear, the aloneness, I had felt a spark of freedom. As if I had lost a weight in knowing that he was more than I knew, and I wasn’t responsible for all of it. There was lightness about it, an atmosphere without pressure, a kind of invisibility, and I would have to think about that.

At home, we went together to check on Elliott. He lay quiet in the crib, breathing gently, and I saw that he was alone, just his own small body in that crib, he was asleep, and I could not be there with him. Such a small moment snapped in me, I saw clearly, and it felt just then like a loss and I wanted to cry a little for it, but could not.

The next day he was still alone. I helped him but I was not him and I knew it. Knew it. I saw that I could leave him safely with Karen; that when he was asleep it could not matter who was in the next room, watching television or reading, looking in occasionally. What had been unthinkable a few days earlier was now just there, through some mysterious process of withdrawal. It seemed to me then like a lesser love, less consuming and giving — less maternal? — but there it was. It felt also as if some intensity had gone out of my own life, something very real and clear was muddied now and I was a little lost again. I thought, “I really must sit down and think about this, figure out what’s happened and how it came about, and whether it’s good or bad,” but I never did.

Stephen and I didn’t talk about it. The change was mentioned only once.

“You seem a lot more relaxed these days,” he said casually a few weeks later, and I told him I felt more relaxed, which in its way was true. But it was more than that. There was almost a hole, despair. There was no — passion. But there was a freedom, a relaxation, a kind of relief, so the passion must have been a burden.

Stephen and I grew closer again, in a way. We shared Elliott, and I think I was even grateful as things changed that I wasn’t necessarily the one the baby turned to. I almost forgot about the other Stephen I had seen, the glimpse I’d had of other possibilities.

He no longer insisted that we go out together every week, and sometimes we just stayed home, the way we had done before Elliott, and read and talked. Early in the evenings he played with Elliott while I watched, listening to them laugh. Stephen said Elliott was starting to look like me, and by then it was true; he was leaving babyhood, becoming a person, developing a character and a look, and yes, he was like me.