They’d been arguing about Gracie Lord in a roundabout way: since Lauren met Graham, he hadn’t so much as tried the rosé wine she sometimes brought home. It was too girly, he complained. Too sweet. But then, all of a sudden, he loved rosé. Couldn’t get enough of it. That night, it came out that that was because Gracie drank it, too. “So her opinion matters more than mine, then,” Lauren said. She thought she’d said it jokingly, but Graham stiffened and rolled his eyes.

“Have you two hooked up?” Lauren dared to ask, surprising herself.

Graham got a weird look on his face. “No,” he said quickly. But he was lying. She thought she could tell.

Lauren had felt herself getting worked up. She’d felt all the fear, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the inadequacy—all those things rolling and twisting and metastasizing into fury. And then, just like that, the rage boiled over. She recalled Graham’s placid expression as he tried to talk her down, but that just made it worse.

In a finger snap, she was across the kitchen, next to the fridge instead of by the island. More lights were on, different ones. The faucet was running when it hadn’t been before. And Graham was staring at her with a horrified, damning expression, and now he was holding the baby. But hadn’t she been holding the baby? When had she passed him over?

It was so disorienting that she started to panic. It felt like she’d blinked and it had become the next day. She watched as Graham held the baby to his chest. There were tears running down his cheeks.

“What?” she’d said to him. “What?”

Graham looked at her with pity. Matthew was crying that terrible, silent baby cry, when they didn’t breathe for long, agonizing seconds. “Lauren,” he’d said. It was a doomed sort of tone. “You don’t know what you just did?”

She knew Graham hadn’t meant for the police to come. A neighbor had called, someone across the street who heard them screaming. When they’d shown up, she’d seen, scribbled on his pad, Woman shouting. Abuse?

When the cops knocked, she and Graham downplayed it. It had struck them sober, snapped them out of their moods. One of the officers glanced cautiously at Graham’s bleeding skin near his eye, but Graham had shrugged it off, claiming it was an accident. The cops had looked at the baby, too, who was still crying hysterically, but both parents made a mealymouthed excuse that he was teething and this was just his “witching hour.”

“So no one wants to file a complaint, then?” one of the officers asked, looking more at Lauren than at Graham.