“She’s gone, then?” His voice is very high. “She’s gone. I know.”

I start to cry, and so does he. He leans against the door while his wife waves me in, lips pressed tightly together, unable to speak for fear of wailing.

It’s a small cottage, and as I enter into a colorful, crammed sitting room, I’m reminded that they run a photography business from their home. Glossy postcards sit stacked on their coffee table, business as usual—puffins, seals, the lighthouse, sunlit and cheery, Lute Island, an impossible idyll.

Gemma waves for me to sit in a high-backed chair by the window as she lowers herself carefully onto the wine-colored sofa, but I hear the grumble of a boiling kettle in the kitchen and freeze.

They saw me coming, they knew what it meant, and the first thing they did was put the kettle on to offer me tea. My God, the graciousness of that.

I start toward the kitchen.

Tom stands.

I shake my head. “Please. Let me.”

There. An instinct.

I’ve never been in this house before, and it feels both familiar and strange to take it over, like I’ve stepped into a brand-new corner of my own home. I’m being intrusive, acting like I know my way around their bright tiled kitchen, but I know that this is the right thing here. It’s a simple action that I am more than capable of performing. Three mugs, three pyramid bags from the tin, pour, wait, remove, milk—they won’t take sugar, I’m guessing; Avery’s healthy diet had to come from somewhere—walk two mugs carefully into the living room.

Avery. Healthy. I’m going to be sick again before this day is done, but not here. Not in the face of their larger grief.

They take the mugs from me, cradling them silently while I go back for mine. I draw a breath at the threshold to the sitting room, then take the offered chair.

Gemma moves her lips. She forms a word, with effort, and holds it in place, then she slumps, like she’s given up on saying it. Her husband puts a hand on her back, his eyes locked on his mug, the steam.

She closes her eyes at his touch and swallows. Then she tries again.

“You know that it might happen.” Her words are tightrope careful. “From the moment they’re born.”

Her face contorts, and I see what she’s seeing—Avery, born, just a child, just possibility, a new thing, red with need and life and hope. It wasn’t that long ago.

Why didn’t you leave? I wonder, but I will never ever ask it.

Will you leave, Nina? Knowing what you know now?

Go on and run.

They want me to say something.

“Was it—?” Tom stops himself.