“I’ll get one right now!” he said, practically jumping out of bed, one leg in a pair of jeans before she could even respond. “I’ll be right back.”

“We can get one later,” she said, laughing.

Ezra smiled and kissed her again while buttoning his jeans. “Why put off until this afternoon what you can do this morning?”

Still laughing, she watched him grab his keys and wallet on his way out the door. When they first started dating, when they first were married, Ezra and Emily talked a lot about children, about the risks you took when you had them: What secrets would be hidden in their genetic code? What pathogens might they come in contact with? What accidents could befall them? Ezra said he thought about that every day—how kids could get sick, get hurt, die. But that it didn’t stop him from wanting to take the risk, once he was sure he could provide for a family, once he could care for one the best way he knew how.

“If you look at the statistics, it’s actually not that bad,” he’d said. “When I get too freaked out, I just read the statistics.”

“But when the statistic is your child, the percentage doesn’t really matter,” she’d told him. It was only a small percentage of women who died from multiple sclerosis in their late forties, but that wasn’t much comfort when her mother was included in that percentage. It freaked Arielle out so badly that when she was twenty-two, two years after their mother died, she’d started searching for a husband and vowed to have a child by twenty-six so that if she ended up with MS, too, if she died at the same age their mom did, she’d have a chance to see at least one child graduate from college, something their mother never had.

“That’s true,” Ezra had acquiesced, “but I’ve gotta find some way not to make myself crazy.”

She’d squeezed his hand then. “Having good coping skills is pretty sexy,” she’d said.

And they’d both started laughing. “I can cope with so many things,” he’d told her.