When Blair was with me, he did not see what I saw. Or perhaps it was that he could not feel it: the wrongness that crept in sometimes when Penny was holding Ava or watching her. She said and did all the right things, cooed and cuddled her and smiled at her, but there was a note of discord. But if I was the only one who felt it, maybe I was inventing it.

I tried to let Luke’s absence that summer go. I knew on some level that it was unfair to expect Luke to morph into someone else in the face of my personal crisis. Loving people meant accepting them as they were.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” I said to Luke that night as I was unpacking and settling back into our condo after the summer away. I could feel how deeply uncomfortable he was talking about Ava, so honestly I didn’t really want to talk to him about it either. I wanted my life to go back to normal, and in that moment, this still felt possible. We were years out of the Duncans’ house at that point and sharing a spacious, rented condo in the heart of Park City. Since we spent so little time here, we kept the neutral anonymous furniture and tasteful ski-themed art that the place had come with. Neither of us felt any urge to nest beyond putting some family photos up here and there, along with some of us as a couple and with our third musketeer, Blair. We framed the SKI magazine cover that had run just prior to the Salt Lake City Olympics. They’d posed us on Baldy on a glorious sunny day. We were in our racing suits, and I was wearing more makeup than I’d ever worn in the rest of my life combined. They’d blown my hair out and it hung down my shoulders in loose waves, a pair of ski goggles pushed perfectly up into my hair. Blair and I stood proudly, holding our sponsored skis to show the logo like we’d been told to do so many times. Luke posed between the two of us, lounging on the glittering snow, looking like he was at the beach. The headline that ran with the piece was: THE HOPEFULS: ARE THREE YOUNG SMALL-TOWN IDAHOANS THE FUTURE OF THE U.S. SKI TEAM? They loved the fact that we’d known each other since we were kids, that we lived together, that Luke and I were a couple. We’d made a running joke of shouting out our answer to the cover’s rhetorical question each time we passed the photo: Hell yes! we’d say, sometimes thumping the wall next to the photo. It had become part of our pregame ritual.