Tessa came out with one of the psych nurses to say good-bye to Zoe for at least a few days. She’d decided to check herself into the hospital. Emily agreed it was the best thing for her and for Zoe. She gave Tessa a hug and left with her mother’s phone number and instructions to call her once it became morning for real. “I don’t want her to have to wake up in the middle of the night to this. I’m here. I’ll be better soon. And you’re keeping Zoe safe. Tell her that.”

Emily said she would and promised again that she wouldn’t let Chris take Zoe, and then she picked up the diaper bag she had hurriedly packed at Tessa’s apartment and headed home. More choices lay ahead for everyone. And more things would happen that nobody chose at all.

xxxii

Ezra and I moved in together today, officially. I know it seems old-fashioned, to wait until after we were married, but between his jobs and my job, and all the things you have to do to plan even the smallest wedding, figuring out our living situation seemed like the last on our list of things to do. We stayed together all the time, sometimes in his place and sometimes in mine, but actually packing up our things, finding a place we both wanted to live in together, as our first home, we did that when we got back from Mexico.

Initially, Ezra wanted me to move into his place because it was bigger than mine and it would be easier than finding a new place to rent until we had enough money for a down payment, but I liked the idea of us starting fresh together, finding someplace that we could decorate however we chose, a mishmash of him and me, an embodiment of us.

So we went hunting for the right place. And Ezra really got into it, the way he does anything he’s planning.

“I highlighted a map yesterday when I was between patients,” he told me, while we were getting ready to visit some open houses. “If we live in this area, we can both walk to work.”