For the first time in a long time she wants to sit here with him. She can’t quite conjure the last time they had sex. For so long after she lost the final baby, she didn’t want to remember that she had a body. She stopped eating, stopped doing yoga, stopped drinking coffee. Nearly anything that used to please her, she had no interest in. She felt herself wither and liked the feeling, liked the way she felt emptied out.

It was her job that saved her, that latent degree she’d agreed to get so long ago in case. Her double major, art and social work. She’d had to take a test to get certified as a therapist but she was good at tests. There was a dearth, she found out as they started researching moving up here, of social workers in rural areas of high need. She went to conferences on opioid abuse and child and family court. She read and learned about all the various broken systems that she’d railed against for years in the abstract. She was pregnant for the last time during all this, and her brain felt sharp and strong, before it dipped into the fog that came with that last loss.

Even after, it had felt good, relieving, to dive so wholly into something concrete and certain, the first real job she’d ever had that she had to go to every day. She’d tended bar through college, and she and Henry had done various art-delivery and -storage gigs to stay afloat in New York. There was other money: from her grandparents and parents, in lump sums, when things got hard. But this: co-workers and a room where there were often bagels or donuts, the bad coffee, the vague way everyone knew at least one thing about everyone else’s home life. It was so simple and it saved her. She had to get up every morning, shower. She had to make a joke about the coffee or the donuts so the client she sat across from felt less scared. She was the only Black person in the office; it felt often like she might be the only Black person in their whole small town. This was both familiar to her—she’d been brought up mostly in white spaces—and differently strange. Her clients were angry, often. They had lost their children or their children had lost children. Sometimes they asked if they could have another, different social worker; sometimes they called her awful names. But also, she felt useful. She met with mothers desperate to keep their children, helped them try to work within the systems that seemed built to keep them separated. The texture of her own loss shifted. Here were real live people, structures, inadequacies and failures that had nothing to do with her own body and against which Alice might rail instead.