Alice lost five pregnancies in their three years of trying to have a baby, the last one, two years almost to the day of right now, at eleven weeks, the furthest along she’d ever gotten. After that she stayed in bed for a month and hardly spoke to anyone. She’d needed surgery, not once but twice, that last time. They’d just left Brooklyn, and Henry asked Tess to come—Helen was desperate to fly up, but Henry held her off. Tess took the train and then the bus, brought a bottle of gin and six of the tiny chocolate cakes from Alice’s favorite coffee shop in the East Village, and sat with her. They drank, and Tess told stories about her most absurd clients, drew her baths and cleaned the house and helped Henry fend off Alice’s mom. Tess isn’t great at fun, but she’s perfect if you need someone to be sad or anxious with.

“Tell me about the kids,” her brother-in-law says.

She thinks, at first, he means the babies—though Alice does not believe a fetus is a baby. But she does think it’s a collection of cells that portends a whole world of new potentials, both for the carrier and for what the cells might be. She’d thought that fifth time that she’d become inured to hoping, that she wouldn’t feel it as sharply. But something in her shifted when they lost it. She had never been a woman who believed one had to be a mother and she did not believe she’d live an empty, barren life now that she wouldn’t ever be a mother. But she did know that she would miss the children she would never have, the possibility of them that she’d felt forming, for all the years to come.

“They’re amazing,” she says, thinking once again of Maddie. Alice collects small things to give her, trinkets near the checkout at the grocery store; Maddie is obsessed with space and animals, and whenever Alice sees a magnet or a figurine she buys it almost without thinking. She’s embarrassed, often, to give them to Maddie in front of Quinn; half of them are still hidden in one of her closet drawers. She texts with Maddie, on Henry’s phone that Alice gave her—though it’s technically forbidden, communicating directly with the children she’s in charge of. She works for a nonprofit meant to help families hoping to keep their children, and though there are lots of rules about how employees are meant to interact with the families that they work with, there’s hardly any oversight at all.

Quinn pulls the curtains shut as she makes dinner. The streets were empty on their walk back from the Food Town. She’s an anxious person, says her court-appointed therapist. Surrender is a necessary and important part of learning to live free of substances.