Maja took a second pregnancy test that night, and another one the next morning. Both came up positive. After so many negative tests over the last few years, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever get tired of seeing that double pink line. She called her obstetrician after the third test. The receptionist had insisted that Maja didn’t need to be seen so soon, her voice conveying that she had little patience for hysterical first-time mothers. But she’d finally relented. It just so happened that they had a cancellation for that afternoon. Could Maja make it in?

Maja was on the next bus back to New York. As it snaked its way across New Jersey, Maja leaned her head against the window, watching as the highway laced together with others, growing wider as it funneled the multiplying traffic toward Manhattan. The city skyline suddenly sharpened through the haze, forming a strange oasis in the swampy expanse of industrial New Jersey.

Maja could have focused on any individual tower that formed the city’s outline and instantly called to mind what that corner looked like, what food trucks could be found nearby, or which bars and subway stops formed its base. A lifetime spent in the city had made the map of the island as familiar to her as the contours of her own body. But it suddenly looked strange, as if it had changed in some way while she was staying with Aneeta. It was like running into an old boyfriend unexpectedly on the street—the conversation veering between intimacy and the small talk of strangers.

Maja couldn’t believe how emotional she felt. She’d only been gone for a week! The city wouldn’t have changed. It would still be warm and crowded, the way it always was in early June, the subway ripe with the scent of sweaty skin and the sidewalks speckled with water droplets from overworked window AC units. If anyone had changed it was her. No real New Yorker would be this sentimental about the city in the middle of a heat wave. It must be her hormones, she told herself, with a little thrill.

Maja didn’t call Ted to tell him she was coming home a day early. She wanted to give him the good news that night, in person. The pink line on the last test had been so bold and insistent that she couldn’t help wondering if she’d been pregnant this whole time. Had she somehow botched the test she’d taken last month? She thought back over the last few weeks. She’d been exhausted and sensitive, but she’d chalked that up to the problems with the house.