“I know the hormones throw it off, but would it be really stupid to hit Walgreens and grab a home pregnancy test?”

The nurse laughed. “Hold out, honey. Just a couple more hours.”

Christmas had never been so far.

TOM GLANCED AT HIS WATCH, winced. Shit. He’d told Daniels he’d be late, but this was pushing it. “Can you drop me on your way in?”

“I’m not going.”

He paused, then said, “You’ve missed a lot of work lately, babe.”

“I can’t sit at my desk and pretend to give a shit about budgets and timelines, okay? Not today.”

He sighed, jingled the car keys. Pictured the phone on his desk, the red message light blinking. Then he saw the look in her eyes. “Come on,” he said.

They drove downtown and left the Pontiac in an underground garage, rode the elevator up to Millennium Park. The sky was cloudless, and the brilliance of the day had people out in droves: students lounging on the benches, tourists snapping pictures, toddlers playing in the fountain. He got himself a cup of coffee and a juice for her, and they sat on the steps, watching people. Tom used his cup to gesture at a girl with purple hair and a nose ring. “Her.”

Anna followed his look. “She’s a chef. Her dream is to open a restaurant called Gloom. The servers will wear black eye shadow, and the menu will only have cigarettes, red wine, and fresh suckling pig.”

He laughed. “What about him?” An enormously fat man squeezed into a Bulls T-shirt.

“Twelve-inch cock. He makes his girlfriends call him Steel Blue Johnson. Tom, what if it’s negative?”

He looked over at her, his wife, this woman he’d known forever. The wind tugged waves of auburn hair around her face, and she used one hand to brush them out of her eyes. “It won’t be.”

“What if it is?”

“Then we’ll try again.”

She made a sound that was nothing like a laugh. “We’re in debt to our eyeballs.”

“Everybody is in debt to their eyeballs,” he said.

“Not everybody is dropping fifteen grand a pop on IVF.”

He took a slug of cold coffee.

“All this time. The doctor’s visits, all the shots. My God, all that money.” She shook her head. “If this comes up negative, it was for nothing.” Her eyes narrowed, and he followed them to a woman holding hands with a little girl. The girl’s hair was so blond it was almost white, and she wore a polka-dot sundress. They looked like they’d been cast by Hallmark. Anna stared, faint crow’s-feet etching around her eyes. When had those arrived? “Nothing,” she said.

Nothing, he thought, and knew she was right. This thing other people did so easily, for them it came with a long list of costs, not all financial. At first trying for a baby had been fun, had put a charge back into their sex. After a while, when nothing happened, the calendars and thermometers had entered into it. Three days a month became a nonstop fuckathon. He’d had these visions of himself as an oil derrick made of flesh, pumping endlessly and joylessly away. The rest of the month it just seemed like there wasn’t any point. And then acronyms had entered their lives.

Somewhere along the path, things had changed between them. He loved her, knew she still loved him. But it seemed like a habit now. The remnants of something.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said with more conviction than he felt. “It’s all going to be okay.”

She cocked her head and looked at him. It felt like a long moment before she turned back to the park. They waited. When the clock on her phone read 11:58, she said, “I’m scared.”

“Do you want me to?”

Anna took a deep breath, shook her head. “Christmas morning.” She started dialing before he could ask what that meant. The steps were cold through his slacks. Tom could feel his pulse as he listened to her tell the nurse her name. She fell silent, put on hold, and their eyes met, both of them thinking the same thing, focusing all their hope.

Then he heard the murmur of the nurse returning, and though he couldn’t make out her words, he could read the tone, and more than that, Anna’s face, the way she drooped, like everything propping her up had been knocked away, and as he saw his wife begin to cry, Tom Reed added an acronym of his own to the list.

FUBAR. Fucked up beyond all repair.

“OH, HONEY,” Sara sighed. “I’m so sorry.” The younger of the sisters, Sara had always been the cool one, the rebel hitting after-hours clubs and hanging out with actors, but now she had the maternal voice down.

Maybe that’s because she is a mom, Anna thought, and on the heels of that, Stop it.

“What are you going to do?”

Anna shook her head, then sighed into the phone. “I don’t know.”

“Will you try again?”

“I don’t think we can afford to. We’re pretty tight.”

“What does Tom say?”

“He shuts down, tries to tell me everything will be okay. If you don’t acknowledge it, maybe it will go away, right?” She lay on her back on the bed, one hand toying with the fringe of the duvet. Life changed so slowly you hardly noticed. There had been a time they talked about everything. “We really shouldn’t have done it this time.” Her fingers twiddled on a brass button. “It’s just that I thought, one more try, just one more. I was sure it would happen.”

There was a silence, and then, “I could probably lend you-”

“No.” Anna spoke fast. “Thank you, but no.”

“But-”

“No, sweetie.” Her sister had a decent job as an editor at a television post house, but it wasn’t the kind of paycheck that would earn Donald Trump’s attention. And a huge portion of that went to day care for the Monkey. Raising a baby alone wasn’t cheap.

Yeah, but at least she – Stop.

“Want me to come over?”

“No. I’m going to take a bottle of wine into the bath and crash. May as well drink, right?” She heard the bitterness in her own voice, hated it, the drama. “Look, it’s okay. We’ll find a way. And if it’s meant to happen, it will, right?”

Sara caught the hint and changed the subject. “You still on for Wednesday?”

“Definitely.”

“I could call around, get a sitter instead.”

“No, I want to. I love hanging out with Julian.”

“You sure?

“Yeah.” She made her teeth unclench, got her voice back to normal. “I’m fine, sis. I promise.” She took a breath. “Look, I’m going to go. Don’t worry about me, okay?”

“Hey, it’s what I do. No charge.”

Anna forced a laugh, then said good-bye. Hung up the cordless and dropped it on the bed beside her. Stared upward. The blades of the ceiling fan were edged in black dust. It felt like she’d cleaned it not too long ago. Time snuck up on you in the stupidest ways.

She felt the tears somewhere in her throat, put her hands to her eyes. She didn’t want to cry. Her breasts were sore and her body bloated, every heave would hurt, and besides, she’d cried so many times.

So it might not happen for them. So what? Lots of people didn’t have children. They still lived fulfilling lives. She and Tom could spend more time together. Season tickets to Steppenwolf, pay off their debts, travel. Not like the world lacked kids.

She rolled on her side, pulled a pillow to her chest, and sobbed as quietly as she knew how.

WHEN THE SMOKE ALARM STARTED SHRIEKING, Tom was reading in the den again, and again she was locked in the bedroom. Same house, different worlds. They both had their escapes.

The suddenness of the alarm made him swing his feet off the desk, the chair rocking forward as he did. It was a sound he associated with cooking more than anything else – Anna was a great chef, but their ventilation was for shit, and whenever she pan-seared something, she ended up smoking them out of the kitchen and setting off the alarm.

But tonight’s dinner had been cans of Campbell’s nuked and eaten separately. The remnants of his beef stew were cold in the bowl, alongside a novel, the spine cracked so the book lay flat.