Her mother, Maria Rosaria, believed that Costanza had tried to take her life; Costanza did not think that people killed themselves because relationships ended, or because they were married to, or the daughters of, difficult women, or because they lost their jobs, their boyfriends, or their way. People killed themselves because their minds were diseased, because their depression was intractable, because nothing and no one they were attached to in life was strong enough to keep them alive.

Costanza was nearly certain that she was not this sort of person or had this sort of mind. But her doubts were sufficient to keep her from telling this story to Morton, or anyone else. What she did tell him was that her feelings about having a baby changed, once they had.

They were four years into their marriage when one day she was on the subway heading uptown from her apartment, which she had been using as an office, when she gradually became aware of a little boy jabbering away on the seat across from her. Costanza looked up from her reading. She was not versed in estimating children’s ages; he was maybe eighteen months old. He had skin the color of wheat bread. His hair was curled into tight whorled buds, his smile slightly askew. He did not stop talking for the whole ride uptown. Not a word of what he said was intelligible, but it was fluent and emotive, like some kind of foreign language she might once have understood but had now forgotten.

First he babbled his charming incoherence at the old lady sitting next to him, then at a hoodied teenager, and finally at Costanza. With Costanza he carried on a full conversation, answering all her questions and appearing to ask his own in return. It was translating of a different order: she wasn’t translating so much as trying to decipher what the little boy was saying.

All this went on for several minutes, while his mother, sealed off by a pair of headphones, ignored her little boy.

Costanza realized then that a thorn had wedged itself into her heart. The thorn had been there for some time, but she had never been so acutely aware of it before. She was thirty-seven years old, riding the subway on a September evening with a New York Review of Books in her lap, and it devastated her to see this sunny little child reaching out to the world with his own strange language. She had a vision of taking him into her arms and at the next station, while his mother was still listening to her music, breaking into a run.

When she got off the train, her back was saturated with sweat.

At first she thought the moment on the subway was an anomaly. But then a few days later she was walking in Central Park. This time it was a little girl, unmistakably younger than the boy on the subway.