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Faces famously fade from memory, and yet I swear I remember exactly what Pudding looked like. I’m glad I don’t have a picture to contradict me. The lips and the rosiness were the result of blood and gravity. His lips were lovely because he was dead, and because he’d been upside down inside of me, and because he was dead.

All day long I wondered where Sylvie was. She had told me she would be there for the delivery. She finally showed up in the hospital room at five. The first thing she said was, Elizabeth, you were careful about what you ate, weren’t you?

I was in bed, holding very still, but even so I froze. I said in my bad French, I thought I was, but maybe . . .

That’s not it, said Edward.

She got a frightened look on her face and began to pat my frozen arms. Your baby, she said in French, your poor baby. She’s trying to make me cry, I thought, and I still think that’s what she was doing: she was worried that we blamed her, and so she tried to push the blame off onto me, and then she realized it was perhaps not the right time for such a transfer and tried to distract us from what she’d just said. She patted my arms harder. It’s very sad, she said.

I wanted her to leave, but I could not ask, because of course this was all my fault. I still believed that, a conviction so awful and unshakable that I didn’t say it aloud. If I’d said it to Edward, he would have tried to dissuade me, and my belief was an inoperable cancer, dangerous where it was but more dangerous to move. I could not put my finger on what I had done wrong. Eaten something. Failed to eat something. Rested too much or exercised too much. Got pregnant too old. Was smug. He died inside of me: Of course it was my fault. It happened on my watch.

I think, said Edward in a firm voice, Elizabeth would like it if you’d leave now. At the time it seemed like an astonishing piece of mind reading. Sylvie nodded and got up. Call me before you leave Bordeaux, she said, but we never did.

The midwife on the ward the next day was the kindest of all of them, in her forties, with dark hair gathered back and a careworn face. She gave me a sponge bath, and then she said, How are you?

Not good, I said.

But how, she asked me seriously, is your morale?

I smiled. I said, still smiling, not good. Not terrible but not good.

Of all the people who attended to me over those days, she was the only one who seemed to know that a sad thing had happened.

As she left I said, You’re very kind.

She shrugged. Then she said, “C’est normal,” it’s normal, which means, of course, Who wouldn’t be kind to you? But she said it in a voice that suggested that she knew: it wasn’t normal after all.

I have mostly forgiven myself, and on good days I can say, What else could I have done?

I find myself thankful for large and small things, in the way of people who’ve lost two limbs and are glad not to have lost four. Labor and delivery took four hours altogether; that was a mercy. They gave me medication that prevented my milk from coming in, which worked: that, too. We were thankful for the midwives who’d delivered Pudding. The young one said, À bientôt, when she left, See you soon. We were thankful that we could leave France, thankful that we could live near the sea for a few months, extraordinarily thankful that I got pregnant again so soon, and that the pregnancy held. I am not sure what sort of person I would be if that hadn’t happened.

Even now I feel a scalding, pleasureless relief that I pressed Claudelle to see me that morning. I wish I had pressed her more; I wish I had alarmed her into sending me immediately to the hospital — the one in Bordeaux, or the more terrifying one five minutes away from her office. But in the absence of that, I am relieved that when she said, Come at five, I’d said no. If I’d gone at five, Pudding would have been dead already. I wouldn’t have known when it had happened, and I don’t know how I would have gone forward in the world.

A year and three days after the morning I checked out of the hospital, Edward and I woke up in our second rented