Grace was good at making plans; editors need to be organized. As soon as she knew she was pregnant, she was setting up the amniocentesis. From Manchester, we would have to drive to Dartmouth-Hitchcock in New Hampshire for the procedure. This would be in mid-October, when the leaf peepers were cluttering up the roads in Vermont and New Hampshire. It would be a long, slow drive to Dartmouth-Hitchcock in foliage season, Grace forewarned me. When this trip was still four months away, Grace was factoring in the autumn foliage; she was well organized.

Grace would be thirty-five when she became a mother—old enough to make the amnio worth doing, her doctor told her. I don’t remember the leaf peepers or the foliage when Grace had the amnio. I couldn’t keep track of the plans Grace made; Molly had teased Grace and me about our determination to know the sex of our baby before it was born. Molly knew my mom had her own ideas about knowing the sex, and about the amnio.

“There wasn’t the amnesia option when I had you, sweetie—but I wouldn’t have wanted to know what sex you were, beforehand,” my mother told me.

“Amnio is short for amniocentesis, Ray—not amnesia,” Molly said.

“I know, smarty-pants—I was trying to be funny about it!” my mom said. She knew all about the reasoning behind amnio, she assured us—the sampling of amniotic fluid, to screen for abnormalities in the fetus. Little Ray just didn’t like the idea of the needle. “I don’t want anyone sticking a needle in my uterus, sweetie,” my mother said. I would remember that.

I didn’t notice, at first, how Grace overplayed the planning part of our lives. As a full-time fiction writer, I was happy to have someone come into my life and take charge of things. Until I met Grace, I’d never had as much time to write. Everyone said we were well matched. I felt free to concentrate on the fictional details; I entrusted the details of our real life to Grace.

Did I disregard the early signs of differences between us? I suppose I did—I wanted it to work out. “We all wanted it to work out, Kid,” Molly later said.