She wasn’t sure how much longer her mind could take the crushing loss of hope each time her period started again, each time a month passed and the only thing growing inside her was disappointment. Seven months felt like forever. She’d been imagining this child for so long. For two years and seven months, to be exact, since she’d been ready to try right away. Which made each month that she wasn’t pregnant even more excruciating. But perhaps this month would be different.

Emily sat down in her office and quickly reviewed her notes for her first patient, her fingers running along the pages as if they were playing scales on a piano. So many years later, she still couldn’t shake the habit. She closed her notebook and let her hand stray to her abdomen again. If there was a baby in there, its brain was only starting to develop, not actually a real brain yet. Forty to forty-three days—that was when brain activity first sparked.

Kai walked into her office and sat down on the couch, holding one of the granola bars they always put out in the reception area. Free food, both to lure college students in and to help take care of them when they weren’t caring for themselves. He looked over at the aquarium.

Emily had discovered years ago that watching fish swim seemed to relax people, or maybe it was the quiet burbling of the filter. Either way, her patients seemed to like it. And it gave them something to talk about when they were working up to what was really troubling them. It gave her something to look at, too, when she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to hold it together, wasn’t sure if she could be the anchor they needed her to be.

She quickly glanced at the framed quote on her desk. John Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

Then she cleared everything else from her mind as she focused on her patient. She wasn’t going to let him down.

ii

When I met your father, the first thing I noticed about him was his smile.

It appeared, slow and easy, across his face when he saw me walking toward him.

We were in a folk music club in the basement of an old church, the spring of my sophomore year. He offered me his chair and a beer. I offered to share the cup of popcorn I’d snagged on my way in.

We listened to a woman with a smoky voice sing about a crystal castle she’d build in the sky.

He called me his crystal queen.

3