I lay in that bed with my child on my chest and I listened to the man I had married describe her as a problem of family structure, and instead of falling apart I found myself, almost against my will, doing the thing my uncle Rutger used to do at the dinner table — going quiet, going careful, letting the other person keep talking, gathering.

I did not understand yet why that instinct had woken in me.

By the next morning I would.

I had met Nerissa only twice, and both times she had been unfailingly, frictionlessly pleasant, and both times I had come away with a vague unease I could not name and had dismissed as my own insecurity — a pregnant woman’s suspicion of a poised, beautiful colleague.

I had been wrong to dismiss it, and right to feel it.