If this is what you want, then this is what you shall have.

She longed for him to say this one sentence, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “Let’s see what Grubman feels after my next checkup.”

Grubman—Morton’s physician—said there was no physical reason why Morton was unfit to be a father, and Morton let that do the deciding for him, for them. He never once came to her and said, “Let’s have a baby together” or “Let’s make our own family,” phrases that Costanza, looking back, realized she probably ought to have heard before they plunged into the year that upended their lives.

Costanza looked down at the thick rubber-banded stack of Morton’s remaining diary pages beside her. She found herself thinking about a story Morton had told her not long after they first met. He offered it as an anecdote, half-amusing, but also half not, that illustrated the centrality of writing in his life. One morning about two years before he moved into the city, Morton told her, Mrs. Gonzales, his housekeeper, heard a stray dog whining under the hydrangeas that bordered the back patio. She had just given birth to four tiny puppies. With Morton’s permission Mrs. Gonzales made the new family a bed in the pantry. Morton kept reminding her that she should be putting out the word in the neighborhood that there would soon be four puppies, and a dog, who needed a permanent home, but Mrs. Gonzales forgot (“forgot”), or resisted. She wasn’t the only person in the house who enjoyed their company either. Little by little Morton found himself drifting downstairs, first just to check on the puppies and then, as they grew more active, to play with them. More than once he took his favorite, which had a big black patch around her left eye like a raccoon, back up with him to his study, where he continued petting the creature, or playing with her, or just watching her … until one morning he glanced at the clock on his desk. It was past eleven forty-five, and he was nowhere close to the five hundred words that were his quota to produce every day before lunch. He called Mrs. Gonzales up from the kitchen, gave her the animal, and instructed her to find another home for the dogs by dinner.

That story said one thing to Costanza when she first heard it, and quite another now, circling back to it from a distance. It told her everything she needed to know about Morton’s capacity for attachment to anything, or anyone, beyond his work. She should have paid closer attention; much closer.

She plucked a page out of the manuscript at random. Well, not entirely at random, but from the last quarter or so, which was where she suspected he would be writing about their—her—quest to become pregnant, thus the beginning of the end.

She had chosen accurately.