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I was in patient mode and nodded, though I was starting to realize something. I was done with Claudelle. Time on this planet actually ran in only one direction. No matter what, I could not travel backwards to a living baby and an ordinary birth, and I did not want to turn my head a fraction in the direction of the past. Not a second, not for anything. I was done with Claudelle, I was done with the Bordelaise roads I’d driven from the first hospital to this one. I did not want to retrace a thing.

This was a conversion moment for me. Twelve hours before, I’d barely believed in the future. I know that sounds crazy, especially for a pregnant woman. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it existed. At the same time, the flat-earth part of my personality wanted to ask, Where’s the proof? Of course the future kept arriving, of course it did, it arrived second by second, an assembly line of itself. But what I really believed in was the past, which is proven everywhere, and accessible: I’m a librarian, and I could show you where to look. The past is located in microfilm and bound volumes of magazines, in movies, memoirs, ephemera, granite, fluoroscopes in shoe stores; the career of Mamie Van Doren; the never mentioned first marriage and subsequent divorce of my cousin Elizabeth; speeding tickets; the daughters of Akhenaton; the invention of Silly Putty; trilobites. But the future? Let it come, let it age, let it be recorded, I’ll get around to the future eventually.

That’s what I thought until Pudding died, and then, at least for a while, I was like a sinner trembling on the edge of faith, demanding of the future: come, prove yourself, and I will renounce the past and everything I believe in.

In the exam room I did not yet have the courage of my convictions. I took the phone from Sylvie.

“Elizabeth, I am so sorry,” Claudelle said. “Oh. I am so sorry. Please know my heart is with you.”

“Yes,” I said. “OK. Thank you.”

Later I would wonder why Sylvie had made me talk to her. She did it with a kind of medical authority, and I dumbly accepted, thinking that she knew what I needed.

I don’t think it did me a bit of good.

Edward and I clung to each other in the hallway of the Tripod Hospital, waiting for someone to take us to a room upstairs on the ward. The staff would see if they could find a cot for Edward. Otherwise he’d go to a hotel. A midwife passed by, a woman in her early fifties with short hair and a slightly daffy demeanor. She said, in French, Why do you look so sad? You’re going to have a baby!

“Le bébé est décédé,” Edward answered.

There’s a certain French — gesture? moue? — that is ubiquitous and hard to translate. In answer to a question or piece of information, the French person fills his or her mouth with air and then puffs it out, eyebrows raised. It means, It is difficult to say, and it can be the answer to, How do you drive to Lyon? or Do you have this in my size? or, it turns out, The baby is dead.

Of course it all felt like an emergency to us, something to be taken care of immediately. Who would make a woman spend one more moment on this earth than is necessary with a dead child in her body? I thought I’d be induced instantly, I would deliver instantly, and then we could talk about leaving.

No. They would give me some medication to soften my cervix. The next day nothing would happen other than some blood tests to see if they could find an explanation. It’s very important, the doctor on the ward explained. The day after that, they would induce, and le travail would commence when it commenced. We could only hope for the best.

The hospital room was no more picturesque for being French. They had found a folding cot for Edward, a miserable mid-1980s-ish polyester-sheeted appliance that meant he could sleep next to me, though at a considerable drop from the high hospital bed. There’s a peculiar kind of loneliness, sleeping in a room near but not next to the person whose body you most require. He felt too far away. I’d wanted to trail my foot off the bed, dip it into his. Whenever I got up in the night to go to