“Well, she’s a newlywed,” Blair said, smiling. “And her husband is great, right? You like him?”

“Sure. I mean yeah, she seems more stable with him.” We were still all clinging to the idea that Jon had been the source of Penny’s troubles and that Stewart represented the solution. “I just don’t see what the hurry is. She’s only twenty-seven!”

“She wants that baby like you want a gold medal,” Luke said, not knowing quite how right he was. Penny and I shared a capacity for obsessiveness. She would try and try again until she got a child. We would both keep pushing our bodies until they gave us what we wanted.

“I have to have surgery,” Penny told me on the phone one night, choking back tears. After months of trying, she’d been to a fertility specialist. “They have to remove scar tissue, from last time.”

How can I explain the mental gymnastics I did then? Scar tissue, surgery, more proof that her lies about the babies had been in the details, not about their actual existence. They’d been there at some point, they’d left her with wounds. I held on to the delusion that Penny’s lies were discrete, rather than a vein of poison that ran through her. Because the most mysterious of all was why she would lie about any of it.

After Penny’s surgery, she immediately started fertility treatments, a monstrous-sounding process that she documented in prolific social media posts about injecting hormones into her belly, the hormonal and mood swings that mimicked pregnancy without any of the payoff, and, all the while, negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test. It was all made worse by her lupus, which was causing horrible bouts of insomnia and fatigue, swelling in her joints, and inexplicable nausea.

I worried about where she was getting the money to cover the fertility treatments. I offered to help out. After my bronze in Salt Lake and the hullabaloo around Luke and me, Red Bull had signed on as a sponsor and I had more cash than I’d ever had. She told me I didn’t need to, but I wired the money.

After my initial unease, I’d become desperate for Penny to have a baby as well. A healthy baby would wipe the slate clean. The marriage had felt like a new beginning, but we were never going to be able to forget what happened until Penny had a living, breathing, healthy child. And Penny’s need for a child seemed depthless. Nothing else could be enough.

When I was home visiting one week, I decided to surprise Penny at her office at the Kootenai Health Clinic to take her out to lunch. I hadn’t seen her in months. I’d texted her that morning, so I knew she’d be at work. We hadn’t planned to see one another until that evening.