Of course she was pregnant. Why hadn’t she anticipated this? How had this eventuality escaped her attentions? Because the one thing Theo Jaxon wouldn’t want was a baby. Maybe under the right circumstances she could have won him over to the idea. But not like this.

Then another thought had come to her, dawning with a simple clarity: a baby. She was going to have a baby. Her baby, Theo’s baby, their baby together. A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.

Maybe the thing Theo Jaxon needed most of all was a baby.

That’s what Mausami would have told him down at the station, in the little room of shelves that was now theirs. She had imagined the scene unfolding a number of ways, some good and some not so good, the worst of all being the one in which she lost her nerve and said nothing. (The second worst: Theo guessed, her courage failed her anyway, and she told him it was Galen’s.) What she hoped was that she’d see a light in his eyes come on. The light that had gone out, long ago. A baby, he would say. Our baby. What should we do? What people always do, she would have told him, and that was when he would take her in his arms again, and in this zone of sheltering safety she would know that everything would be all right, and together they would ride back to face Galen—to face everyone—together.

But now this would never happen. The story she had told herself was just that, a story.

She heard footsteps coming down the hall behind her. A heavy, loose-limbed tread she knew. What did she have to do to get a moment’s peace? But it wasn’t his fault, she reminded herself again; nothing was Galen’s fault.

“What are you doing down here, Maus? I’ve been all over.”

He was standing above her. She shrugged, still giving her eyes to her horrible knitting.

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

“It’s washed down, Galen.”

“I mean you shouldn’t be here alone.”

Mausami said nothing. What was she doing here? Just a day ago, she’d felt so suffocated by the place that she thought she’d lose her mind. What made her think she could ever learn to knit?

“It’s fine, Gale. I’m perfectly fine where I am.”