“It’s not generosity,” he said. “You can’t bear to be in your own skin.”

I felt pressure in my sinuses and ears, like I was on an airplane. Ian was trying to provoke me. I couldn’t allow him to see that he’d succeeded. He felt he had the right to talk to me like that because we were having sex. In his mind, we were in a relationship. I resented his presumption. I’ve always considered the contents of my brain private.

I wiped up a little coffee that had spilled on the table in front of me.

“If you want to get pregnant so badly, then have a baby with me,” he said. “The idea of being someone’s surrogate. I don’t even get what you think it does for you.”

I wasn’t interested in Ian’s idea of normal behavior. He thought that the surrogacy was fulfilling some short-term desire, at the expense of my long-term happiness. He didn’t realize that my definition of long-term happiness had nothing to do with his.

“It’s an end in itself,” I said.

“What does your son think of it?” I saw some challenge in his gaze.

“No one is asking for your opinion.”

“Do you really have a son?” His eyes bored into me.

“Of course.”

A twentysomething man entered the coffee shop and walked to the counter to order. Cold air rushed in behind him.

“I don’t think you do.” Ian spoke in a low voice.

I laughed. “You have no idea who I am.”

“Does anyone?”

I felt a compression of my rib cage.

Ian put his thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, like he had a headache. “Is it about Amelia and Fritz?”

I nodded. “I want to help them.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In mid-April, two Polish men with thick accents knocked on my door. My father was Polish, so I recognized the movers’ accents as being similar to my two uncles’. The men wrapped my couch in plastic wrap, then blankets, like they were swaddling a baby, then walked it out the door. I’d never hired professional movers. I’d never owned decent enough furniture to make it worthwhile.

Eliza hissed at the men when they entered, and clawed one of them on his pants. I had a feeling she understood our future home to be precarious. She knew that we were undergoing a sea change. And she also sensed my anxiety. I locked her in the bedroom again.

I had invested a lot of my artistic self in the apartment over the last several years: painting the walls, hanging the drapes. And over the last few months, I’d hung photos of Jasper everywhere. The home in which my son and I had lived would soon be vacated. I was giving up all that I had for something uncertain.