“It means there are choices left.”

Later that evening, Eva showed me a photograph on her phone.

The headline announced the coming wedding of Callum Brandt and Sloane Prescott.

It was scheduled for early summer at one of the most expensive coastal resorts in California.

The article described Sloane as the woman who had “given the Brandt family its long-awaited future.”

Beside them stood a little boy with blond curls.

Their son, Archer, was almost three.