Late that afternoon, Emily put down her book, packed her own duffel bag, and looked into her closet. She had to get dressed. She had to get dressed up. She had to put on enough of a show that no one would know how crushed she felt inside.

“Alexa,” she spoke to the white circle on the living room floor. “Please play rock music.”

“Accessing your Pandora rock music station.” The circle blinked at her.

“Thank you,” Emily said.

Emily and Ezra always laughed at how excessively polite they both were to this machine, an anniversary gift from Ari and Jack.

“It just feels wrong not to say please and thank you,” Emily always said.

“I know,” Ezra answered. “It shouldn’t, but it does.”

Alexa or Pandora or whoever started playing music, and Emily pulled out the three dresses in her closet that were appropriate for tonight’s event. One she remembered wearing last year, so she put it back. That left a strapless black sheath dress that she’d worn to the wedding of one of Ezra’s fancy doctor friends a few months before, and a royal blue chiffon gown that Ari had given her because she couldn’t wear it with a bra. The back was cut too low; Ari had worn it once and felt uncomfortable in it all night.

Emily didn’t mind going braless for a night, and decided to wear the blue. Then it would feel a little like Ari was with her at the gala.

—

She left the music on while she showered, even though she could barely hear it over the rushing water. She looked down at her body. In the last few weeks—the last months really, ever since they’d started trying—she’d imagined the day she would look down and wouldn’t be able to see her feet. She’d imagined rubbing cocoa butter into the skin on her stomach and feeling a baby kick back at her. She’d imagined this so frequently that it seemed like it would be a reality, and now . . . it was gone.

Emily let her tears mingle with the spray from the shower head, rinsing soap from her face as she wept. How could Ezra go back to work? How could he be okay? How could he make her go to this stupid fund-raiser tonight and pretend that nothing was wrong?

—

When she got out of the shower, Alexa was playing the Kiss song “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” and Emily felt like she was transported back to the stage at Webster Hall, when she and Rob were riding the music, before she got pregnant the first time, before she fell, and before everything after.

“Alexa,” she said, as she toweled off her hair. “Please play ‘Crystal Castle’ by Austin Roberts.”