I bought her the thermometer and predictor sticks and vitamins and a logbook, and though she showed no initiative, she used them at my urging, maintaining a record by the bed. She didn’t tell me when her body was ready. But I checked her journal, and when her LH hormone surged, I announced I was calling Arun.

I couldn’t wait to see him. Arun was sparkly. He would’ve been a star anywhere. He listened closely, as though what you said mattered, he was goofy the way men never are—subjugating himself for a laugh—and he was beautiful: his hair a soft ripple, his cheeks padded with the flesh of a teen. Once he was back in the apartment, the whole endeavor would make sense again.

Our first two months in Laramie, we saw Arun daily. He worked next to us on the couch after his classes and ate with us at the nineties-style vegetarian restaurant that leaned too heavily on bulgur. We hiked on the weekends without finding trails or paying for parks. We picked any mountain and pulled over on the country highway and marched through sagebrush and over deer ribs until we achieved the top, Maggie clinging to my arm, leaning her cheek against my shoulder and infusing me with love. She gathered treasures: a whistle, a lizard head, a thorn as thick as a fang. I saved them all.

One afternoon, at the summit of our favorite mountain, all of Laramie squatted before us. While Maggie exclaimed over the prairie, I pictured Matthew Shepard out there on a fence, slowly dying. Maggie asked what I was thinking and I said nothing; it was all so beautiful.

“I’m cold,” Arun said, and Maggie threw him her tank top as a joke, spinning off like a naked animal into the aspens. He pried the shirt over his head. The straps stretched across the drum of his chest, the cotton nearly tearing, and he called Maggie back, opening his arms. “Look—I’m finally a lesbian.” We laughed until we crashed down into the chaparral. That was the last afternoon Maggie and I were easy with each other.

The day after her positive surge, I met Arun at the door to our apartment building, by the block glass in the stairwell. His hand trembled as he brushed ice off his shoulder. “Am I early?”

“You’re perfect.” I sounded like I was hissing, “Let me steal your genes.”

“Cool,” Arun said. “I guess I should come in?”

I led him to the living room. Maggie was waiting upstairs. She was too nervous to socialize until the process was complete, but it felt wrong to send Arun off to masturbate instantly. Besides, I liked his company. Here was this thirty-five-year-old man, beautiful and brilliant with a perfect job, fine without a baby or even a girlfriend. He saw a few girls in town and sometimes took trips to LA, returning sunny and fortified. But largely he was the picture of someone who could be happy alone.