She got her Ph.D. and married Pat Malone. Without any apparent resentment, he packed up his veterinary practice and moved it to Los Angeles because Gloria received a job offer there.

I had got a job teaching at Peck High School (the most desirable school in town because it was new and many of the students were the children of professors), and Frank was hired by the university as an assistant professor. We bought a nine-room, fifty-year-old house and the vacant lot next to it. The first few nights we were in it, we wandered through the large, empty rooms sipping on wine and making plans for the paint, wallpaper, rugs and furniture. A few times, when the second or third glass of wine had mellowed him, Frank would turn misty-eyed, slip his arm around me and assure me that his family was never going to be crowded. I clearly recall the urgency in his voice, as if he were saying we would never starve or perish in a flood or contract a fatal disease. We were never going to be crowded.

Two months later, I became pregnant. It was verified by the doctor on a Wednesday, but I waited until Friday night to tell Frank. I wanted the weekend right there with no work interruptions, so we could celebrate and play with the future. We stayed in bed talking until Saturday afternoon. That night he took me to the best restaurant in town. In candlelight and over champagne, we suggested names back and forth. By the end of the evening, we were leaning across the table, holding hands, whispering.

“Why are we whispering?” I whispered.

He smiled lazily. “Because no one else in the world has to hear us. I want you always to be just a whisper away.”

That weekend I fell in love all over again, but this time painlessly, luxuriously. Sunday night, Frank gave me a bath in that old chipped tub we would eventually replace. He washed me, oiled me, dried me off, and wouldn’t let me lift a hand to any of it.

“Until the baby comes,” he said, “you’re the baby.”

When we got into bed, he stroked my belly in a soft, circular motion, then laid his head there and kissed it.

“It’s going to be loved,” he said. “It’s going to be so loved.”

I finished the statement in my head: “The way you weren’t.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s going to be loved.”

He kissed me there again, soft and lingering. “It’s the purest form of love there is,” he murmured.

I knew I had heard him say that before, but I was too drowsy to recall where and when. I went to sleep with my fingers in his hair.

She was born on June first, my birthday, and we named her Regina Frances. I had had my heart set on Mary (I was always fond of alliterative names), but Frank argued it was too common and too religious. There was really no other name I wanted, so I gave in when he insisted on Regina. At least, I thought, it sounded dignified: Regina Mattison would be quite suitable for a writer or an actress or a Pulitzer Prize winner. Naturally, I never pictured it in newspaper stories about a murder trial.