He must have read something of this on her face, because he crossed to her and picked up her hands, squashing Baby Walter between them. “You are the most wonderful mother alive,” he said. “But your job is so much more important than mine. Yes, I think one of us should be home more, and I think it should be me. I know it means changing our way of life, Compton. But think of it: We can let Mildred go and I can be there for the kids. We can move to a small town somewhere”—(what??)—“and have a backyard and clean air and a garden to grow our own vegetables.” (Again: what?? She’d never grown so much as a houseplant.) She forced herself to tune back in.

“But, honey,” she said gently. “We don’t know how to do all that stuff.”

“Aha!” said Ellis in a voice of triumph. He darted over to his desk and opened a drawer, from which he extracted a stack of hardcover books. He held up the first one, entitled Grow Your Own Food: A Homesteader’s Guide to Going Off the Grid. At what must have been an appalled look on her face, he hastily thrust that one to the bottom of the pile and started displaying the others, which were, thankfully, much saner-sounding tomes on wholesome ways to entertain children, tips for maximizing efficiency in housework, and natural products for lawn care.

“You’re serious about this,” she said, her voice still soft.

“I am. I am going to learn how to do this and make things nice for you.” There was no mistaking the unapologetic joy in his voice. “We’ll eat better, we’ll be together more, and you’ll sleep more.” Sleeping more was Compton’s most ardent desire in life; she’d worried her years of interrupted sleep had resulted in making her stupider. All those years of depriving her neurons of rest: it couldn’t be good. “And,” he added, in a less ebullient but still hopeful tone, “maybe I can finally sell my novel.”

For a moment Compton allowed herself an imaginary window into what small-town life with a stay-at-home Ellis could be like. They’d get a real house, not an apartment. Since this fantasy could be constructed however she liked, she threw in all the clichés: a picket fence with climbing roses, an emerald-green lawn, a playhouse. A wraparound porch, enveloping an old Victorian with scalloped shingles and curly embellishments tucked into the eaves. Ellis and the children would have breakfast on the porch on clear, temperate mornings, dining on homemade meals both healthy and enticing: yogurt-berry parfaits; oatmeal pancakes; tiny, adorable vegetable quiches. (Perhaps country children were fond of vegetables.) Ellis would get into whole foods, frequenting farmers’ markets and even actual farmers for the ingredients for their meals that he could not produce himself.