He let go and took my wrist in his rough hand. “Have you ever taken your pulse, Mila?” he asked me. His voice was lower now, as though these words were for me only.

“I can’t remember,” I said.

“I feel it,” he whispered. “Boom. Boom. Boom. Here. You try.”

I pressed my fingers where his had been but I couldn’t feel anything.

“Keep trying,” he told me.

I moved them. I pressed harder. When I looked up, his green eyes were watching me. “It’s all right, sweet girl,” he said in a kind voice. “You’ll find it. I can see it in you—the intuition is not too far buried.”

“What about me?” My mother laughed. “Am I a lost cause?” It sounded like a joke but I knew better.

“Oh, Miriam,” Blake said, and looked away.

“What?” she asked.

“I shouldn’t say it,” he said. “Let’s not worry.”

“You shouldn’t say what?”

“It’s just . . .” He turned his face to the sky. He looked at her and squeezed his eyes shut as though what he was thinking pained him. “You have a deficit,” he finally said. “But let’s just hope for the best.”

“What do you mean, ‘a deficit’?”

“We don’t have to discuss this, love.”

“Blake,” she said. “I want to know.”

“Well, here it is. It is a sad truth, but the science can’t be argued with. Teenagers—not just you, Mila, but all of them—they have trouble regulating their emotional responses. This is about the amygdala, you see, which is part of the brain, and how it interacts with the frontal cortex. It’s about the balance between emotion and judgment. That’s where the intuition lies. You need to find the balance. But when a girl gets pregnant as a teenager, when her amygdala isn’t yet fully formed, the pregnancy hormones take over during the most crucial years, the formative years.”

“Then what?” my mother asked. I could feel her worry, could see it in her face.

“Then you may never develop the intuition you need to exist as an independent person in the world. You’ve never been one, Miriam. It isn’t your fault. It’s the cards you were dealt. When you first told me that you had a daughter, I considered calling it off. I spent many a sleepless night thinking it over. Not because of the responsibility of a stepchild—which is not insignificant—but because of the deficits that teen motherhood causes.”

My mother sat very still, her hands cupped in her lap.

I said, “But don’t they kind of have to grow up faster?”