In 1993, when the Huntington’s disease gene had been isolated, it became even clearer just how the deadly booby trap on chromosome four was to blame. Every human being carries two copies of the gene for Huntington’s, a segment of DNA that contains a repeating sequence of nucleotides called CAG (cytosine, adenine, and guanine, names Rebecca gave to the three ugly goldfish she won for a dart-game prize at a carnival out in Bethany, where she and George had gone for the afternoon after a trip to George’s favorite used bookstore, really tough goldfish who managed to survive for more than a year despite her indifferent care). The number of repeats makes all the difference. People who will develop Huntington’s have in at least one of their two Huntington’s genes more than forty CAG repeats, an error that geneticists call a genetic stutter. Those with thirty or fewer CAG repeats within the gene will not get Huntington’s.

With the test available, there seemed to be no good reason not to have the answer at last. George was tested in the last week of May. Rebecca went with him for the blood draw. It was a beautiful Thursday afternoon, so exquisite that even gritty New Haven seemed romantic and filled with promise.

The test results came quickly in the middle of the following week, when George was back in New York. His CAG repeat range was thirty-six, in that dreadful range called “indeterminate.” He might get Huntington’s, and he might not. He might be a carrier, and he might not. He had agreed to find out his fate with a certainty. And now here he was, stranded in the no-man’s-land in which he had always dwelled. He would get sick, or he would die without having developed Huntington’s, even though he would always feel stalked by it every day of his life.

Over the years, Rebecca had come to feel that some of their friends with children, and they had many, both in New York and in New Haven, were threatened by their apparently voluntary childlessness—as if children were the obligatory glue necessary to hold a couple together after a certain number of years—and in their unlamented failure to bind themselves with babies, they were breaking some unwritten rule. They were simply two very well-matched people who each thrived on being seriously alone when they weren’t together, as Rebecca had explained so many times to her friends, some of whom just didn’t get it and probably harbored secret certainties that they each had lovers on the side, or that one of them was actually gay, or both of those things.

Rebecca spent many weekends in New York, and George spent a night or two in New Haven in the alternating terms during which he taught a composition seminar at the Yale School of Music. At other times, weeks could pass when they were apart, though they spoke almost every day. Rebecca and George gave each other more space and privacy than most people would admit to wanting or needing. How they lived suited them both perfectly, most of the time, although it wasn’t suiting Rebecca at all perfectly at this precise moment.