A day, a night, a day; and so on. Calling her doctor’s panel, sighing and bleeding, tucked in. She listens to her young family’s mild, faraway voices through the closed door, Ted humming, Frieda’s talky, liquid chatter and occasional thumps, the sound of her rubber ball escaping across the flat’s small space. Live and warm, her child; live and warm, nearly a year safe in the world, babbling in the front room with Ted—

Sylvia peels back the blankets and the sheet. Has it come? Is it over? There is only a little blood on the towel, and nothing to do.

Ted sits at his cramped hallway desk. He looks up when he hears Sylvia moving from the bed, traveling their bedroom floor to stand under its threshold. Frieda, too, sitting sturdily in the front room, looks up from the amusements that surround her. Arrayed across Ted’s desk are a pot of glue and sheets of clean white bond, upon which tattered fragments of inked or typewritten paper are pasted in crooked horizontal trails, like inexpert ransom notes.

She opens the door. “I can’t bear to just lie there,” Sylvia announces flatly, her voice sudden and loud in the apartment’s tense quiet.

Ted scrapes his chair back and begins to rise, getting out of her way in the narrow vestibule. “Why don’t I get you some tea, or a brandy—” he offers, enlisting his genuine compassion, ready to withdraw toward the kitchen behind them.

“No,” she answers, feeling suddenly abashed, resisting the impulse to wring her hands. “I just need something to do.” The flat is miraculously orderly, as if nothing at all had happened. It seems to have already forgotten Friday’s diplopic calamity—the ripped-up papers, the rags of paper all over the floor, apocalyptic against those red walls; and within hours, the real blood. While she has been in bed, doctor’s orders, Ted has erased the evidence, a thought almost as mortifying as the evidence itself.

“Would you like me to call your doctor again?” Ted asks. “Do you feel worse? How is—” he says, hesitating, avoiding the painful details, blanching himself at the horrific memory of her standing amid the debris of his life while he kneeled over the shredded book and manuscripts, salvaging handfuls, collecting scraps in a cardboard box, her face still a mask, fearsome, not of the stony, irrational rage he came home to, opening the door to a maelstrom, but of fear—of the unforgivable, of the very real pain that was draining her face of color. On his knees, in a blizzard of paper, a vision of his wife, newly pregnant: her face ghostly, a thin ribbon of bright red blood trickling down the inside of her calf.