I’d be back at Fairfield after one last weekend at the lake. I missed my patients and the feeling of competence I had at work. I missed thinking up wicked jokes with Kait.

Being surrounded by people who were in their final years—sometimes final moments—could tear a person to pieces. Laughter was the only way we could cope. It was like the momentum needed to keep going forward on a bicycle. The humor propelled us down the halls.

Work would be fine, but I was worried if Rick and I would get along as beautifully outside the sanctuary of the lakehouse. He’d told me last night, “I want you to meet my boys. Let’s go to Tuscaloosa soon.”

The thought of his sons, freed from the locked room in my brain, made me start to shake. Please, God, let them be crazy about me. I would Google every possible area of interest for eight-year-old males, study them like Goodall and chimps. They would love me. I would make them love me.

I had smiled and answered, “Sure, that would be great,” even as my insides liquified and boiled in terror. “I can’t wait to meet Joshua and Jeremy. I’ll just need some time to get caught up at home and work.”

Liar.

I couldn’t tell Rick that in my most recent fantasies I was already married to him and pregnant with our first child. I saw him fussing over me the same way he had at the lakehouse; breakfast in bed; the occasional bouquet of flowers, rubbing my tired feet. We’d shop for adorable tiny clothing and paint the nursery together. No, Rick wouldn’t let me paint. Too risky for the baby. I’d bake cookies instead, filling our new house with wonderful smells.

When the baby arrived I’d use my huge check from Violet and stay home to be a full-time mom. I nuzzled the cheek of my baby girl—it was always a girl—and patted her back as I carried her across the nursery. It was tastefully furnished in pastel blues and greens. I laid her on the changing table, which Rick had built of mahogany with his own hands. The baby smiled and gurgled happily, stuffing a tiny fist into her drooling mouth.

I held those thoughts for a minute or two before my brain slapped my heart: Rick already had a family, and was fourteen years older than I was. He’d never given me any indication he was interested in more children—it was a subject we’d both felt sitting in a corner staring at us, shaking its head and holding a finger to its lips. I always avoided any mention of marriage or children, preferring to circle a minefield that could blow us apart forever.

I scolded myself for worrying. We loved each other. It would work out. Jeez Louise, Ronni, quit looking for trouble.