Title Page

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Dedication

FOR MEG

Epigraph

I think the rules were different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn’t care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.

—JACK WOLCOTT

Part I: Jack and Jill Live Up the Hill

PART I

JACK AND JILL LIVE UP THE HILL

1. The Dangerous Allure of Other People’s Children

1

THE DANGEROUS ALLURE OF OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

PEOPLE WHO KNEW Chester and Serena Wolcott socially would have placed money on the idea that the couple would never choose to have children. They were not the parenting kind, by any reasonable estimation. Chester enjoyed silence and solitude when he was working in his home office, and viewed the slightest deviation from routine as an enormous, unforgiveable disruption. Children would be more than a slight deviation from routine. Children would be the nuclear option where routine was concerned. Serena enjoyed gardening and sitting on the board of various tidy, elegant nonprofits, and paying other people to maintain her home in a spotless state. Children were messes walking. They were trampled petunias and baseballs through picture windows, and they had no place in the carefully ordered world the Wolcotts inhabited.

What those people didn’t see was the way the partners at Chester’s law firm brought their sons to work, handsome little clones of their fathers in age-appropriate menswear, future kings of the world in their perfectly shined shoes, with their perfectly modulated voices. He watched, increasingly envious, as junior partners brought in pictures of their own sleeping sons and were lauded, and for what? Reproducing! Something so simple that any beast in the field could do it.

At night, he started dreaming of perfectly polite little boys with his hair and Serena’s eyes, their blazers buttoned just so, the partners beaming beneficently at this proof of what a family man he was.