Later, the baby, named “place of hawks,” rested on Aurora’s chest like a heart. His skin felt sticky and hot against her. His breath came evenly, making his ribcage—the wings of a bivalve seashell—rise and then fall. His crown smelled like petals. She whispered into the top of his head, “I have never loved anyone so much and I never will again.”

He sighed in his sleep as if he’d heard her, and when she held out one finger, he curled all five of his around it. Though it took them awhile, when he finally latched securely to her raw nipple, it was as if they had never been apart.

She woke in the night and saw the baby watching her from the crib where the midwife had laid him on his back so Aurora could rest. That being, that perfect creature with his watchful brown eyes and black cap of hair and sweet-lipped mouth had come from her body? The thrill and shock of it made her wince with a kind of pain almost worse (better?) than what she’d gone through to deliver him. She had to tell someone! But whom could she tell? The only person she wanted to see, to tell, was Ever.

In her fantasies, she had stood in Ever’s kitchen cooking and he came up behind her and ran his fingers up under her T-shirt, caressed her breasts, slid his hands down the slope of her belly, the jut of hipbones. She was so wet for him, and he slid his fingers into her just as his tongue slid between her lips. She wriggled away, fell to her knees, and unbuckled his belt. Slithered leather through belt loops. Metal clanked on the tiled floor. He pushed out through his boxers, and she took him into her mouth. He came almost right away, and she swallowed all of it. Her lips still tasted of him later when he came again inside of her.

But this was only her fantasy, and she knew she might never see him again, could not even tell him about the baby. They had only slept together once. And I almost got him killed, Aurora reminded herself, and now I’m dead, too. But you couldn’t raise a child if you were dead. She could no longer give up everything for a man—which she feared she’d do again—no matter how much she loved him. She could not let herself love another man, especially not so soon after Cyrus’s betrayal and death, so soon after she had begun to face the truth and find herself.

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