After the night last week that I’d spent with Elizabeth, when Michael had made his way back from the trip to West Texas with Wyatt, we’d discussed it. How scary it would be to lose a child. How much we hoped everything would be okay for our friends. Wyatt had said they’ve been trying for about two years. The next step was a fertility specialist.

I thought about Elizabeth, her colorful kitchen, how careful she was—not just in life, but with people. She’d be a good mother.

And then I imagined my own child. Coloring papers or folding them into shapes. Swimming in Lena’s pool. I’d been four when my younger sister, Molly, was born, but all three of us girls babysat when we got older. I knew something about kids. Maybe I’d be a good mother, too.

Michael would sure as hell be a good dad. But I didn’t want to present him with a “maybe.” He was an only child, a planner. I knew he’d been thinking about what his parents getting older would mean for us, weighing the pros and cons of moving (a bigger paycheck, a clean slate for me) against the distance it put between us and them.

And it was a Saturday. He wasn’t the kind of guy who slept in, but it was still super early. If I was careful, if I didn’t wake him, I could duck out, get a test, and be back before he woke up.

Later Michael meticulously dissected one of the tiny cameras we’d found the day before, while Brady came back and swept the house with an RF detector. I followed him through every room, watching him run it along the edge of the ceiling and sweep every inch of the wall. The thing beeped and vibrated but didn’t find any other cameras.

“Does that mean there aren’t any?” I felt like my body was humming with its secret, even though I hadn’t taken the test yet. The directions said to do it first thing in the morning, and this was a test I didn’t want to fail. Even though I was saving it for Sunday morning, the world around me was opening, blossoming like a flower. These cameras were relics of the past. I should be afraid, I was sure I should be, but I wasn’t. They were like Aimee, like the thousand prying eyes of strangers on the internet. They couldn’t touch me.

“None that are transmitting.” Brady lowered the device and met my eyes. “Seriously, the batteries in those things were dead, and little guys like that don’t transmit far anyway. My money’s on the old guy.”

“Lena said he was a pervert?” I was playing the part of a normal person, asking for reassurance, and Brady seemed just as eager to give it as Lena had been yesterday.