For a moment I am invisible in the dark. I could go back upstairs, but I do not. “Elizabeth?”

She startles, looks momentarily betrayed, perhaps wondering how long I have been standing here watching her.

“Have you seen him?” I step into the room, but I can’t sit; the vision of the crawling boy is fresh in my nerve endings. I wonder if that’s why she’s down here at two o’clock in the morning, distracting herself with infomercials. “Please tell me you’ve seen him.”

“Seen who?”

In the artificial light, she’s aged by the moonlike glow, as old as she has ever been and older still by the minute. But she is calm, unafraid. I tell myself to be calm, to be unafraid. She lifts her wineglass to take a sip, then hesitates with it inches from her mouth. “The doctor said I can have one,” she murmurs defensively.

“One glass or one bottle?”

“That’s funny.”

The dark figure crawls through the back of my mind. “Look, there’s something I have to tell you.”

She waits for me to continue, then lowers her glass. “Well, spit it out. Or are you going to keep dancing around it?”

Maybe I should just keep dancing. Just dance away, down the halls, and never speak of this again. I don’t know who he is, after all. The boy could be anyone.

And yet, I feel it in my gut. I know who he is.

“I’ve seen Julian.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yes, I know. You were at the ultrasound.”

“No, I’ve seen Julian. Here, in the house.”

A short round laugh escapes her, and her face invents an expression of bottled annoyance, amusement, contempt—clenched teeth behind closed lips.

“Julian? Here in the house?” she says with determined levity. “How could you possibly have seen someone who hasn’t been born yet?”

“Lizzie.” She scowls at my infantilizing her name. “You know this house. What if …?”

“I don’t believe you.” She takes an angry little sip. “Mother, I can understand. She’s always had a few marbles loose. But please don’t tell me you’ve bought into her New Age mumbo jumbo.”

“It isn’t mumbo jumbo.”

“Please. In any case, how is it you’ve come to recognize my unborn son, when you’ve only just seen a fuzzy little gray picture of him?”

“He called me Auntie.”

“Oh, of course, that explains it.”

We’re at a stalemate. If we continue on in this way, sooner or later one of us is going to crack. I hope it isn’t me.

“I’m afraid there’s something wrong with him.” I look around, wishing for him to appear again. I need him to show himself, to show Elizabeth what I cannot possibly explain with mere words. Maybe she would be able to see his face. “You’ll see.” I look around, half expecting him to come crawling toward us out of the shadows. “I just saw him upstairs, not ten minutes ago.”

“This is just like your ghosts. When you were a kid,” she says, with more wonder and disbelief than spite. “Remember those? You were so scared that we looked through our family’s whole genealogical record, but the people you saw never lived in this house. It was all made up.”