She started walking downtown, taking some comfort in the familiar rhythm of dodging and weaving through the crowds of people along Madison Avenue. She had one repeating thought: How did I get here? She’d thought of her marriage as ideal. She’d smugly looked down on their friends who bickered and picked at each other, or who seemed more interested in their own careers than in their relationship. She and Ted, she thought, had crafted the perfect balance, and she’d prided herself on how nicely they’d arranged things. He paid the bills and she kept their lives interesting. Maybe she’d relied on him too much to manage their finances, but that was his profession, after all. And the truth was that she’d always thought of it as Ted’s money. He wasn’t totally wrong: she’d liked maintaining the artifice that she’d never sold out. Even if she wasn’t painting anymore, she still worked in the arts, and she liked to think that it was just a detail that she was married to a Wall Street guy. She hadn’t wanted to look too closely—either at their finances, or at how much she enjoyed perks and privileges of Ted’s job. It was so different than how she’d grown up, always having to consider the cost of everything before anything else, her parents making constant trade-offs between what she wanted and what they could afford. It had felt good, for a little while, to leave those calculations behind. Just like it felt good to assume that her relationship was on unshakable footing.

It felt naive now, but she’d never seriously worried about her marriage. She loved Ted, and the only flirting that she did was of the professional type, necessary in gallery work. The secrets that she kept were minor, and had to do with how much she paid for a certain pair of boots, or which of his friends made passes at her after too many drinks. They were secrets she kept for the sake of smoothing things along. She’d never imagined that Ted was capable of harboring a secret so big, and so disastrous.

What if now, just as everything was coming together—when they were about to have a child, and the house of their dreams—it was too late? Maja thought about what her doctor had said: “You’re at the beginning of everything.” She wanted to believe it.