I nodded and swigged from the beer, so cold it punched the back of my throat going down. Lately Brendan had been pressuring me to get pregnant, and I was having a hard time justifying my reluctance. I had told him early on in our relationship about how my mom had died, obviously, and that I’d grown up in foster care. He knew I had baggage, but I’d kept some things hidden. How I’d screwed up with Amy and Jason. How I’d lost them. I knew it wasn’t rational, but on some level, it almost felt as if I’d already had my chance at kids and botched it, badly.

I still checked in on Amy and Jason from time to time, which I also didn’t share with Brendan. Almost the first thing I did as a cop was search for their names in the database, trying to piece together from a scattering of home addresses and workplaces and speeding tickets whether or not they’d really made it through their childhood. Whether they were truly okay.

The last time I’d looked, just a year or so ago, Jason was a day laborer living in Daly City with a dodgy girlfriend who had a long list of priors. Mostly small-time stuff. Jason had no criminal record beyond shoplifting, traffic violations, and one DUI, but he was a frequent visitor at a methadone clinic, a detail that made me feel sucker-punched when I read it. Amy was still in Redding and had been married twice, as far as I could tell. I’d asked a colleague with ties in the area to do a little more digging, discreetly, without explaining my relationship with her or why I needed to know how many kids she had and if they were from different dads, what kind of neighborhood she lived in, and how long she’d been a manager at the Burger King where she worked, and if she looked happy.

I could have driven there myself if I’d had the courage, of course, and knocked on her door. I had imagined that reunion thousands of times, but had never made it past the moment in the script where she slammed the door in my face for failing her. The closest I’d come in real life was sitting in my car one day watching Jason rip shingles off the roof of someone’s tired-looking garage with a few other shirtless guys. Then he shotgunned a forty-ounce in the front seat of his dusty two-tone El Camino while I thought about that damned stuffed cheetah of his, how he couldn’t sleep without Freddy pressed right against his face. I never knew how he was able to breathe like that, but as he cranked up the Beastie Boys and peeled away from the curb, I found myself wondering, instead, how he breathed without it now. Without me.

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