I sent Arun upstairs with my laptop and a glass vial. I should’ve checked on Maggie, but the news about her novel, and Arun’s story, had me jittery. I lingered between my office, where Arun produced the ingredient, and our bedroom, where Maggie lay. Both rooms radiated tense silence.

I could picture my child, finally: small and dark-haired, strolling with me at the foot of the mountains. She was real to me now, so real I was afraid to touch the air at my hip for fear of grazing her head. But when I pictured life with her, Maggie wasn’t with us. I saw myself and the child, or the child alone, or another figure between us. Arun, even, but not Maggie. I’d told myself our relationship was perfect, and I hadn’t worried enough when the freeze set in. But she was writing away in secret, while pretending to be depressed—or she really was depressed. Maybe the novel was going well and she was sad she couldn’t share that—because of my success, or because of competition between us, or maybe the novel was about us and she didn’t want me to know. Whatever the reason, we couldn’t survive like this.

Losing both her and that dark-haired kid was a double punch in the gut. I loved Maggie. And I loved the kid already so much, ridiculously much, and she’d never even breathe. Now I understood what I’d lost: a girlfriend and a little person in a jasmine-flavored yard in Los Feliz, pulling vines off the house and training them up jacaranda trees, drawing with a sleeping baby’s sunlit face pointing up at me from a cozy sling. The hot red loops of nostrils, the mouth sealed with no reason to ever cry, the smell of sweet bread rising from that golden scalp.

I braced myself to tell her. But then I put it together. After I’d agreed to have kids, Maggie had never raised the issue once. She didn’t want a baby, or she’d come to the same conclusion I had and was afraid to tell me. So maybe we were on the same page. Maybe we could be okay.

The door to the office opened. One of Arun’s hands protected his crotch while the other extended the vial.

“Don’t look at it,” he said. “That’s too weird.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You can go.”

He looked at me, wounded. “Just like that?”

“I’m sorry.” I wanted this whole sad attempt over. “Please, Arun.”

“Okay, fine.” He’d hoped to be part of the family maybe, though he’d signed his rights away. “So long as you aren’t mad. About my story or whatever.”

Of course I was mad. “I’ll call you.”

I held the vial with two hands as Arun thumped down the stairs. The plan had been to keep the fluid warm and draw it with the syringe. I opened the bedroom door with a shaking hand.

Maggie was stretched naked on the bedspread. Her tawny hair covered her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. She smelled like sun-soaked hay: dry and hot and safe. This person had lied to me. She was happier than she could admit; she was thriving. My heart lifted for her joy, even if it was separate from me.