So she keeps at it with the fleeing, her breath rasping hot in her mouth and her feet clopping and clopping, until it seems the man is chasing her on the back of a horse he has managed to find. She will lose the baby, she worries, from running and fear. It’s a little baby, so little it’s not even a baby. Onscreen she read it’s the size of a lipstick, but, Rachel knows frantically, she loses lipsticks all the time. They fall out of her purse like lemmings, and now she is at the front door of her house—bungalow, is what they call it, but the word sounds so fragile that she knows the terrifying man will tear it apart, like a boy with a box. Why did she run here and lead this galloping beast to her home? She could at least have saved her boring husband. She is ringing and ringing the doorbell with one hand and trying to wrest the keys out of her pocket with the other. A tissue and a lipstick fall out—see?—and then the door is open, her husband shocked in sweatpants with his hair tufted out like an infant bird, one hand bookmarking a copy of The Expecting Book, the bible all expectant women read, and he looks so dazed and concerned that she throws herself into his arms. The book drops and she sobs a little on his shoulder and kicks back with her foot, slamming the door, she is certain, on the rampaging nose of her terrible pursuer.

“What?” Ben is saying over and over. “What, sweetie? What? What?”

“There’s a man,” she is able to say, “on top of the Japanese school.”

They’re quiet for a minute, and Rachel, still clinging to her husband, can hear the tick of his mother’s loud clock, surrendered when she moved to Arizona. Ben reaches over her to click the locks locked. Sensible of him, she thinks, and lifesaving. “He was chasing me.”

“Start over,” he suggests, and gentle-arms her into the living room. His tossed-away blanket, a steaming mug on the little table, the props he has from staying up waiting for her, now waiting for them both. She sits where he was sitting, the cushions still warm from his bulk, and shivers. “I couldn’t sleep again,” she says, “so I was walking—”

“You know you panic me when you do that.”

“I know,” she says.

“I had to get up just to wait for you.”

“OK, but there was a man—” She shivers again and grabs Ben’s mug for a sip. He starts to say something, and doesn’t say something. It’s a toddy in her mouth, heavily honeyed but God Almighty the taste of whiskey when she’s given up drinking, even watered down she drinks it like she’s suckling. “On top,” she says, wiping her mouth with her sleeve, “of the Japanese school.”