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Tess decided this was probably not the best time to tell him that she had sent Whitney out to land a date with Baltimore’s best known bachelor. She moved her feet, creating a space for Crow to sit. Of all the things she disliked about her confinement, the worst had been sleeping alone, out here. A small thing, not sleeping in the same bed. No, check that. A big thing, a huge thing. She felt estranged from him. He was loyal, but she realized now she was never truly sure of him. Over the years they had been together, he ran away from her twice. Both times she had all but forced him to leave her, but still—he was the one who ran. What if he ran again?

“Do you remember,” she asked, “how we met?”

“I worked in your aunt’s bookstore.”

“You had a crush on my aunt.”

“Everyone who worked in the store had a crush on your aunt. It’s a rite of passage.”

“When did we fall in love?”

“Isn’t that a song from Fiorello!?”

“Possibly the worst musical to ever win the Pulitzer, no small feat,” Tess said.

“And poor George Gershwin got no recognition when Of Thee I Sing won.”

The exchange of trivia cheered her. It was normal, it was what they did. “I’m just saying, this all seems so . . . accidental.”

“The pregnancy was an accident. Our life together feels purposeful to me. That’s why the baby didn’t faze me. I always assumed we would have one.”

“You did?” It had been a shock, when she first went to see the ob-gyn, to discover the cause of her nausea. The next shock was discovering that she was considered, at thirty-five, an “older” mother. She thought she had all the time in the world to start a family, if that’s what she decided she wanted, and then she was told she was a long shot.

“Yes. I just thought I was going to have to launch a campaign. By the way, I know you don’t want to make any plans about the baby, but there is one thing we have to talk about.”

“Yes?”

“We have to pick out a guardian.”

“I thought we settled on Whitney.”

“The other day, when I was out with her, I started to ask, but I had second thoughts. I don’t think she likes kids, Tess.”

“She’ll like our child.”

“She’s so . . . rootless. Living in that cottage on her parents’ property, working at the family foundation. And she gets bored easily.”

Crow had never criticized Whitney before and it made Tess uncomfortable. What else might he criticize? And whom?

“Do you have an alternative in mind?”

“Not really. That bothers me, too. We know a lot of people, but not many intact families, with kids. Soon that’s going to be our peer group, that’s going to shape how we live. Our life is going to change, Tess.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

This had been a refrain since her pregnancy first became public. Oh boy, is your life going to change. Usually, it was said with joy and anticipation. But just as often there was a flicker of malice in it, a misery-loves-company vibe that Tess found disturbing. No more restaurants, her friend Jackie, the single mother of a little girl, had pronounced. That is, no more real restaurants. You’re not going to see a cloth napkin for another ten, fifteen years. Others had predicted the end of sleep, sex, travel, reading, a clean house, and clean clothes. Apparently, she and Crow had been having far too much fun and it was now time to pay the piper, to surrender to this invading army of one. Why was this information withheld until it was too late?

“I’ve heard all the lectures,” she told Crow now. “I still think that we can take her to restaurants we like. And we don’t travel that much, so that’s not a big deal, and—”

“Tess, I’m talking about your job. A job that, at times, has been dangerous.”

“Just the once,” she said.

“You were almost killed ‘just the once.’ And there have been other close calls.”

“I’m much more cautious than I used to be.”

“That’s true,” Crow said. “But what about the mundane details? Take, for example, surveillance. What if you’re watching someone but I need to go to work and we don’t have backup babysitting? Are you going to go on jobs with the baby in the car seat, strap her into a Snugli