The trip to New York, that night at the Waldorf Astoria, after too many bottles of wine at dinner with Ethan’s agent and editor. They’d had fun, damn it all. They pretended it was their first time, reenacted the events of their first fateful meeting. He left her in the hall waiting to come into the room, without her panties, for ten minutes.

That trip.

Sutton knew better than to get pregnant to save their marriage. That’s something desperate women did, and she wasn’t a desperate woman. She had a rocky marriage, but they were trying to smooth the jagged edges. They’d turned the page in New York, she was sure of it.

Turned a page, yes. Then they’d driven the car right off a cliff, holding hands and crying hallelujah.

Dashiell truly was a surprise, an accident. No, not an accident, Sutton, a blessing. He was a blessing, then and now. An angel. A cherubic little angel, a gift from God.

The Lord giveth. He giveth more than we can handle, sometimes.

Her doctor told her there was a reason the birth control pill had a 3 percent failure rate, even for women who took them religiously. Which she had. She’d even set an alarm on her phone and carried them in her purse. She was never a moment behind schedule. She ran her birth control like she ran her life, seamlessly, organized, structured.

She didn’t like to think of her baby as a statistic.

But the cracks were forming before the pregnancy. The mangled car was at the bottom of the cliff, still smoking.

Dashiell, while adorable, was a thorn in her already rocky marriage. A baby meant scheduling—for the sex, for the trips, for their (her) work, for their life. They were no longer carefree, untethered. There was a constant flow of things that needed to be handled, from diapers to feedings to naps to babysitting. To nannies. Many, many nannies.

It was her Goldilocks nature again. This one was too strict, this one too loose. This one she walked in on getting high in the laundry room. Sutton blamed herself for that one; the girl’s name was Moonshadow, for heaven’s sake.

Finally, finally, they settled on a genuinely lovely young woman named Jan, Just Jan, as Sutton liked to think of her. She was plain, with pale blue eyes and white-blond hair done in two braids that swung on either side of her neck like a butter-churning dairy maid. She had a degree in elementary education, but hadn’t liked teaching. She was better off one-on-one. Sutton thought she probably had a touch of Asperger’s—her social cues were severely lacking—but she was devoted to Dashiell, and he to her.