“Why do I let her talk me into this shit?” I mumble, staring at the instructions I thought were in English, but may as well be Greek.

“Shit!”

I turn horrified eyes on my eighteen-month-old daughter’s cherubic face. She’s triumphant because she said a word.

A really bad one.

I squat down to the floor where she’s playing with the Sesame Street app on her iPad.

“We don’t say that word, Nina,” I tell her gently, running a hand over the dark coils of hair springing with life and health. Bristol takes such pride in finally figuring out how to do our daughter’s hair. Jade, of all people, who wore cornrows to the prom, helped her, Jade and YouTube—and my mama, and Shon. Apparently, it takes a village to do Nina’s hair.

“Shit!” Nina says again, her delighted eyes startlingly silver against the copper of her skin.

“No, baby.” My panic rises. The kid can’t say “dog,” but manages to say “shit” twice in ten seconds. “Bad word.”

“Shit!”

“Dammit,” I say under my breath. “Bristol’s gonna kill me.”

“Dammit,” Nina parrots absently, her attention already back on Sesame Street.

This is bad. I’m devising how to make this not my fault when my cell phone rings. Splitting a look between the directions I won’t understand without Rosetta Stone and the toddler I’m corrupting, I glance at the screen.

“Mrs. O’Malley, hi.” Pleased to hear from her, I slide my back down the newly painted wall to sit on the floor. “Happy belated birthday. I hope you got the flowers we sent.”

“Yes.” The one word comes over the line faintly but carries her distress. “I . . . thank you. It was sweet.”

“Is everything okay?” I frown, wondering what could have the usually upbeat owner of our place in New York upset.

“No, I . . .” Her voice collapses, and her pain reaches across the miles. “He’s gone, Marlon. Oh, God. Patrick’s gone.”

For long seconds, her tears, the sound of her grief, shreds me. I’m at a loss, searching for the right words to say, but if Bristol goes first, there won’t be any right words. The whole world will be inadequate if I lose her. I won’t insult Mrs. O’Malley with my platitudes. I respect her devastation, letting her weep for a few seconds until she can speak again.

“It was peaceful,” she finally says, her voice still not strong, but clearer. “I knew it would happen soon, but I wasn’t ready.”

How can you ever be ready to lose the love of your life? The question, even theoretically, accelerates my breath and pricks my heart in sympathy for her and in resignation that one day, we’ll all taste this pain. Death is the most inevitable thing in this life.

“It was the strangest thing,” she continues, fine with me not speaking. “I went to visit him last week, and he said my name.”

A fresh bout of tears floods the line before she continues.

“He said my name in that way only he ever said it.” Her voice sounds wistful, younger even. “Esther. That was it, but he looked right in my eyes and he knew me, Marlon. I know he did. It was really our last moment together. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

“Mrs. O’Malley,” I finally say. “I’m so sorry. I . . . is there anything we can do?”

For the space of a heartbeat, she’s silent, and then her voice comes strong, like I’m used to hearing it.

“Yes. Yes, there is,” she says. “Keep sending me pictures of that beautiful little girl. We never had children, you know, and . . .” Her words fade into a trail of memories, a path of regrets.

“Of course,” I reply immediately. “We’ll bring her to see you when we’re back in New York.”

“Yes, do that.” She pauses before saying more. “And the apartment is yours if you want it.”

Even as my heart contracts for her loss, I can’t deny my excitement. Bristol and I have leased that apartment for years, hoping one day it would be ours. We’ve made love under the vivid city skyline in that greenhouse, and Bristol made her first pot of edible collard greens there.

It’s where I proposed and where Nina was conceived.

“I . . . yes. We want it, of course.”

“I’ll send all the paperwork to your firm.”

“Sounds great. They’ll take care of it.”

“And one more thing, Marlon.”

“Yes, ma’am. Anything.”

“Remember what I said the first day we met.” Her voice is a thin thread strained to the point of snapping. “Don’t waste one minute.”

Before I can respond, she hangs up. I hold the phone for a few extra seconds, still pressed to my ear like she might share more wisdom. I finally slip it into my pocket, not pulled from my stupor until I feel something wet on my toe.

“Nina, baby.” I scoop her up and rest her on my hip. “Don’t eat Daddy’s feet.”

I walk down the stairs to find Bristol. We’ve been in this house for less than a year, but it felt like home immediately—Bristol made sure of that. She insisted on decorating it herself, thus me going gray trying to read Japanese instructions for something that could have been delivered fully assembled. I’m too rich for this shit.

She’s in her office, wearing a frown, ripped-knee jeans, a paper-thin ankle-length cardigan, and a tank top that simply says PERSIST. It’s tight and strains over her swollen breasts and belly. She massages her side, eyes glued to the screen of her laptop.

“Hey.” I put Nina on the floor, lift Bristol from her seat, take her spot, and then pull her back down to sit on my lap.

“Hey.” She turns her head, looking around until she spots Nina, who has taken her post on the floor with Elmo.

Mrs. O’Malley said not to waste a minute, and I won’t. Before Bristol can say another word, I grab her chin and pull her face around to me, delving between her lips, caressing the soft hair escaping from her topknot. She kisses me back, hunger sparking between us like a flare. She turns to face me, splitting her thighs over mine, straddling me with our unborn child sandwiched between our torsos. The kiss slows then stills until she tucks her head under my chin and slides her hand under my T-shirt, caressing the muscles of my stomach.

“What was that for?” she asks huskily, looking up with a smile, her eyes the same silver as Nina’s. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“Mrs. O’Malley’s husband died,” I tell her without any lead-up. “I just got off the phone with her.”

“Oh my God.” Bristol sits back, one hand going to her chest. “Is she . . . how was she?”

“Devastated.”

“I would be inconsolable.” Bristol looks at me, her eyes softening and saddening in empathy. “We’ll send flowers and make sure to visit her when we’re back in the city.”

“That’s what I told her.” I watch for her reaction to my next statement. “She says we can have the apartment.”

“What?” Bristol’s head pops up, her eyes widening. “We can?”

“Yeah, if we want it.”

“We want it!” Bristol bends her brows with a sudden thought. “We’ll have to set up a nursery there, too.”

“Yeah, about the nursery—I’m not assembling any more furniture. That shit’s in German or something.”

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Bristol’s narrowed eyes shift from me to our daughter clapping and happily cussing on the floor. My wife pokes a finger in my chest.

“Marlon James, you better fix her.”

It takes the rest of the day to reprogram Nina, and I’m still not convinced she won’t say “shit” at inopportune times. I’m plating steaks from the grill for dinner when I realize it’s been a while since I heard any sounds from Bristol’s office. She’s negotiating a new deal for Jimmi, a Vegas residency, and it’s been more complicated than she anticipated. Kai’s in another Broadway show, and Rhyson wants Bristol to set up a Prodigy office in New York. I have to keep an eye on her because she acts like she’s not seven months pregnant.

When she’s not in the office, I check the nursery because that’s where she seemed to always be when it was almost time for Nina to come. We don’t know gender, don’t know names—we’ll figure it out when the baby gets here. With our first pregnancy, we knew too much. We even knew that our baby wouldn’t make it. We decided with Nina to take whatever came, and we’re doing it again with this one.

As I expected, Bristol’s in the nursery, but not setting things up or preparing for Baby Question Mark’s arrival. She’s sitting in the glider, where she’ll nurse this baby the way she did Nina. In her lap is a box I haven’t seen in years.

Zoe’s memory box.

We only held Zoe for a day, but I think about her all the time. She lives on in our hearts, but also in the three people who received her organs.

Bristol looks up, eyes as wide and wounded as the day we lost our baby girl.

“I miss her.” She shakes her head and bites her lip. “I think I always will.”

“Of course, we always will.” I go to my knees beside her to study the items in the box on her lap—Zoe’s tiny handprints and footprints, the lock of her hair, pictures of our family and friends holding her, joy and heartache evident in every shot, the purple feather that hung on her door.

“She’s a part of us,” I finally say after we caress all of our memories. “As much as Nina is and as much as this one will be.”

“Yeah.” Bristol nods and tears trickle down her face.

“Dwell in possibility, baby,” I whisper against her belly.

Bristol lifts my chin until I meet her eyes.

“Dwell in possibility, baby,” she says to me, her eyes tender, loving, secure.

“Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?” I ask.

“A boy, definitely.”

“Definitely?” I cock a brow at her apparent clairvoyance. “How would you know?”

“I just have a feeling.” She shrugs and runs her hand over my head as I lay my lips to her belly. I push the tank top up to see her stomach, hoping for a kick or some signal that our baby is active and healthy. Bristol’s beautiful pregnant. She thinks I say that to make her feel better, but I love how her body blossoms, her breasts full and heavy, her skin glowing.

“Ask me when your belly is full like the moon, and our love has stretched your body with my child,” I say, quoting the vows we took years ago. “Leaving your skin, once flawless, now silvered, traced, scarred.”

I look up, meeting her eyes, swimming again with tears, and I caress the faint striations at her waist, on her skin—from Zoe, from Nina, from this baby she’s carrying now.

“I will worship you,” I remind her, taking her hand and tracing the letters tattooed beneath her wedding band, linking our fingers, showing her the ink beneath mine.

“Still?” she asks with a watery smile.

“Yeah.” Always. Evermore. Even after. “Still.”