Instead, I decided to join the devil. I ate another huge slice of the dessert, just to keep from checking my phone. When I picked it up, it rang, as if my touch had brought it alive. The number was unfamiliar. Hadn’t I asked for an ordinary life, with ordinary fears? This was ordinary life in a Wisconsin blizzard. Black ice on a road, on a frigid night. The paramedics would say he was breathing on his own, which was good...stop, Thea, I said. Stop it. But the universe was talking. There was no shutting it up.

It was Stefan. And he was calling from someone else’s phone because he’d left his in the truck.

“What happened, Stefan?”

Jep set his second sandwich down and came to stand next to me.

“It’s Rebecca. She’s in trouble here. The baby is coming. It’s awful. I’m taking her to the hospital.”

I pulled on my coat and Jep grabbed his.

“You don’t have to drive me,” I said. “You know I’m a better driver than you are.”

“Please,” he said. “Don’t disgrace the holy day by lying through your teeth. Anyhow, it’s more that there will be two of us if we get stuck.”

We got stuck within fifteen minutes, the car having spun like a figure skater and nosed into a snowbank. I was stunned by the amount of snow that had fallen, easily twenty inches. By then, I could see the lights of the hospital, like watch fires through the snow. “I’m going to walk,” I told Jep, who just shook his head. A few blocks on, I realized that the lights of the hospital were the urban equivalent of being able to see the Rockies from western Kansas. I was unavoidably reminded of the night Belinda died. Even my eyeballs were wet. A Jeep pulled over just ahead of me. In it were two boys, maybe eighteen years old. “Do you need a ride, lady?” one of them said. It crossed my mind that this was how murder podcasts began. It was the driver saying “lady” that convinced me to risk it, that and the fact that I had about four steps left in me by that point. When I got inside, I looked so woebegone that the person at the ER desk asked me the nature of my injury.

There were so few people in the hospital that someone from the information desk volunteered to personally walk me up to the OB floor, probably to have something to do. “She’ll remember this blizzard, huh?” the woman said, and I thought, Rebecca would be hearing this for the rest of her life.

Stefan came running the minute the elevator doors opened.

“Mom! Oh god, you have to help her, something awful is going on. She’s in terrible pain!”

While we waited for the nurses to finish Rebecca’s check, Stefan told me what happened.