We compliantly made love that night because we were supposed to. We were exhausted. But we felt so real. We had wedding bands and a catering bill and adrenaline headaches.

I forever take you, my best friend and my soul mate, to be my partner in life, through everything that’s good, and everything that’s hard, and the tens of thousands of days that fall somewhere in between. You, Fox Connor, are the person I love. I commit myself to you.

Years later, our daughter watched me stuff the dress into the trunk of our car. I was going to take it back to the same place I’d found it.

4

I remember exactly what life was like in the time that followed.

The years before our own Violet came.

We ate dinner, late, on the couch, while we watched current affairs shows. We had spicy takeout on a black marble coffee table with vicious corners. We drank glasses of fizzy wine at two o’clock on weekend afternoons and then we napped until someone was roused, hours later, by the sound of people walking outside to the bar. Sex happened. Haircuts happened. I read the travel section of the newspaper and felt it was research, realistic research, for the place we’d go next. I browsed expensive stores with a hot, foamy beverage in my hands. I wore Italian leather gloves in the winter. You golfed with friends. I cared about politics! We cuddled on the lounge chair and thought it was nice to be together, touching. Movies were a thing I could watch, something that could take my mind away from the place where I sat. Life was less visceral. Ideas were brighter. Words came easier! My period was light. You played music throughout the house, new stuff, artists someone had mentioned to you over a beer at an establishment filled with adults. The laundry soap wasn’t organic and so our clothes smelled artificially mountain fresh. We went to the mountains. You asked about my writing. I never looked at another man and wondered what he’d be like to fuck instead. You drove a very impractical car every day until the fourth or fifth snowfall of the year. You wanted a dog. We noticed dogs, on the street; we stopped to scratch their necks. The park was not my only reprieve from housework. The books we read had no pictures. We did not think about the impact of television screens on brains. We did not understand that children liked things best if they were manufactured for the purpose of an adult’s use. We thought we knew each other. And we thought we knew ourselves.

5

The summer I was twenty-seven. Two weathered folding chairs on the balcony overlooking the alley between us and the building next door. The string of white paper lanterns I hung had somehow made palpable the creeping smell of hot garbage from below. That was where you said to me over glasses of crisp white wine, “Let’s start trying. Tonight.”

We’d talked about it before, many times. You were practically gleeful when I held other people’s babies or got down on my knees to play with them. You’re a natural. But I was the one who was imagining. Motherhood. What it would be like. How it would feel. Looks good on you.

I would be different. I would be like other women for whom it all came so easily. I would be everything my own mother was not.

She barely entered my mind in those days. I made sure of it. And when she slipped in uninvited, I blew her away. As if she were those ashes falling into my orange juice.

By that summer, we’d rented a bigger apartment with a second bedroom in a building with a very slow elevator; the walk-up we lived in before wouldn’t work for a stroller. We drew each other’s attention to baby things with small nudges, never words. Tiny trendy outfits in store windows. Little siblings dutifully holding hands. There was anticipation. There was hope. Months earlier I had started paying more attention to my period. Tracked my ovulation. I’d made notes to mark the dates in my day planner. One day I found little happy faces drawn next to my O’s. Your excitement was endearing. You were going to be a wonderful father. And I would be your child’s wonderful mother.

I look back and marvel at the confidence I found then. I no longer felt like my mother’s daughter. I felt like your wife. I had been pretending I was perfect for you for years. I wanted to keep you happy. I wanted to be anyone other than the mother I came from. And so I wanted a baby, too.

6

The Ellingtons. They lived three doors down from the house I grew up in and their lawn was the only one in the neighborhood that stayed green through the dry, relentless summers. Mrs. Ellington knocked on our door exactly seventy-two hours after Cecilia had left me. My father was still snoring on the sofa where he had slept each night for the past year. I had realized only an hour earlier that my mother wasn’t going to come home this time. I’d gone through her dresser and the drawers in the bathroom and the place where she stashed her cartons of cigarettes. Everything that mattered to her was gone. I knew enough by then not to ask my father where she went.

“Would you like to come for a nice Sunday roast at our house, Blythe?” Her tight curls were shiny and hard, fresh from the salon, and I couldn’t help but reply directly to them with a nod and a thank-you. I went straight to the laundry room and put my best outfit—a navy blue jumper and a rainbow-striped turtleneck—in the washing machine. I had thought of asking her if my father could come, too, but Mrs. Ellington was the most socially appropriate woman I knew, and I figured if she didn’t include him in her invitation, there was a reason.