Lauren ceased her inspection of the room. She looked at her hands in her lap. “I was thinking about my babies,” she said.

“Can you tell me what the thought was, precisely?”

“I miss them.”

Doctor Summer uncrossed her feet, and re-crossed them the other way. The shiny skin on her legs looked as if it might be naturally hairless. It sagged slightly at the calves, shot through with spider veins.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Lauren noticed a smear of dried mud on the back of her thumb and rubbed at it.

“I think so,” she said. “I got upset.”

“You were upset,” said Doctor Summer, making a note.

“Yes. The boys were gone, I didn’t know where they were, I was going crazy waiting for them to be found. It was the worst thing imaginable.”

“You didn’t know where they were.”

“No. And I didn’t know if they would ever come back. You don’t know what it was like.”

“Tell me, Lauren. I want to understand.”

Lauren didn’t say anything for a long time. She kept thinking that the rug on the floor between them should have had her two kicking, smiling boys on it, and it was odd being here in this room without any babies at all. Morgan would have loved the black and white posters. Riley would have loved the crinkly fabric leaves.

“Tell me about what happened when they found the babies,” said the doctor. “When they brought them back to you. How did you feel?”

It seemed a loaded question. Surely she already knew what happened. Lauren tried to work out what the doctor wanted her to say.

“At first I was happy. They’d been gone for … I don’t know how long. It felt like forever.”

The doctor waited for her to go on. After a time, Lauren said, “So, when they were returned, it was the best feeling in the world.”

The doctor waited again for Lauren to continue, but she did not.

“And then what happened?”

Lauren looked past doctor's head at the sky through the window. There were several enormous trees in the distance. She could hear laughter, from somewhere outside. A toddler’s laughter. She tried to imagine what the boys would be like as toddlers, but could only conjure those unnerving, unknowable faces from the riverside. The doctor moved her head into Lauren’s eye line. The woman really had an alarmingly unusual face. Wouldn’t her parents have been given the option, as a child, to have those ears pinned back?

“Lauren,” she said, “you told me you got upset. Why do you think you felt that way?”

“I don’t know.” She did know.

“Was there something about the babies that upset you? You just told me how much you missed them. Why would seeing them upset you so much?”

Lauren looked directly into the doctor’s eyes. She opened her mouth slightly, but didn’t speak.