It wasn't long after Grace's birth six months earlier that we'd developed a family ritual that consisted of a Saturday morning breakfast out followed by errands and grocery shopping. The morning after my first solo bedtime flight with Grace, Lauren drove us into town on our way to breakfast. We were planning to eat at Marie's, followed by some grocery shopping at Ideal, bagels from Moe's, bread from Breadworks, and wine from the Boulder Wine Merchant.

All without moving our car. Almost like in a real city.

As we crawled up Balsam past the mini-roundabouts toward Broadway, Lauren cursed at an elderly man in an impeccably preserved old turquoise Chevy Bel Air who signaled a left turn and then smoothly pulled right into the driveway of a modest brick ranch that had held its value a lot better than his car.

At the sound of Lauren's profanity, I leaned into the backseat and told Grace to cover her ears.

Lauren didn't laugh.

It should have been my second clue.

The reason I was missing so many clues was, I think, that I was out of practice. From the moment Lauren had become pregnant fifteen months before, she'd enjoyed a sabbatical from her long struggle living with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Her neurologist had told her that the pregnancy might indeed provide a respite from her chronic symptoms and a brief protection against fresh exacerbations of her illness. It turned out that he'd been right on both counts.

What were the usual signs that something was brewing with Lauren's health? Withdrawal and distraction. She'd sense some sign of change in her functioning-pain, weakness, numbness, vertigo, something-and she'd pull away from me. She'd also display signs of irritability.

But my radar was rusty and I was out of practice. For fifteen months I'd floated along on the gentle sea of denial, buoyed by blind hope that our daughter's birth would be her mother's ticket to prolonged good health.

The selection of breads at the bakery didn't include the multigrain that Lauren coveted. Her disappointment at the news was much too keen. The table at Marie's was uneven and Lauren leaned over to fidget with sugar packets until the wobble disappeared. The waitress brought Lauren coffee, not the tea she'd ordered. Lauren tried to sigh away her uncharacteristic annoyance at the mistake. She failed. When she looked over at me and said, "I'm not up for this, Alan. Can we skip breakfast this morning?" I finally realized that something was wrong.

I lowered my coffee mug back to the tabletop and said, "You're not feeling well, are you?"

For a prolonged moment every sound in the crowded coffee shop was muted. No motion blurred anything in my periphery. I followed Lauren's gaze as she looked at Grace, who was asleep in her infant carrier. Tears formed in Lauren's lower lashes.

"What is it?" I asked, even though I already knew.

She didn't answer right away.

"Are you symptomatic?" I said. With Lauren, I didn't need to be any more specific. I didn't need to reference a specific illness. We both knew I was inquiring about her MS.

She nodded, flicked a poignant glance at Grace. At the same moment, she said, "I don't want to be sick anymore, Alan. I don't."

I covered her wrist with my hand-her hand was balled into a fist-and waited almost a full minute for her to continue. When finally she did, she said, "We can talk about this later, okay? I think I'd really like to go home. But we need to stop at the drugstore first. You know?"

I nodded. I already knew about the drugstore stop. She and her neurologist had decided that Lauren would forego prophylactic treatment for her MS during her pregnancy. But by then, Grace and Lauren had each been fortified by six months of breastfeeding and Lauren was planning on resuming her interferon treatments. The prescription for interferon, which was intended to hold fresh exacerbations of Lauren's multiple sclerosis at bay, was waiting for her at the pharmacy. I was suddenly wondering, of course, whether she was restarting the medicine a week or two too late.

Lauren said, "Why don't you take Grace?" and stood. I dropped a couple of bills on the table and lifted our daughter and her baby carrier while Lauren strapped the diaper bag over her shoulder. As she preceded me out the door and headed toward the parking lot, I examined my wife's gait and her balance, looking for signs of what might be ailing her.

I couldn't discern a thing.

Damn disease.

It was like being surrounded by no-see-um bugs. Couldn't find them to swat them away.

Lauren and Grace, Emily, our dog, and Anvil, our foster dog, all slept away much of the afternoon. I was left to spend the day with gutter cleaning, and car washing, and the most noxious of all chores, worrying. Before she retreated to the bedroom for the afternoon, Lauren had revealed that her new symptoms included muscle spasms in three different locations on her left side, some worrisome new tingling in her left hand, and shooting pains in her right foot. The sum of those signs wasn't cause for alarm. She wasn't going blind in one eye, wasn't paralyzed anywhere, wasn't falling over from vertigo. Maybe it wasn't anything major. Not a big storm, I was hoping, just heat lightning flashing on the horizon.

Then she'd added another detail. She was experiencing what she called brain mud, a general fogginess in her sensorium and her thinking. We both knew that she usually experienced the brain mud either as a prelude to or as a result of an exacerbation of her MS.

The presence of the brain mud meant that Lauren and I would be balanced precariously on the edge of a cliff as that day became night and today became tomorrow.

For the second evening in a row I put Grace to sleep by myself. Lauren's fatigue seemed even more pronounced than usual; I sensed that she was asleep before Grace and I finished the last story of our bedtime ritual.

The morning was warm, almost sixty degrees before dawn. Grace and the puppies were still asleep and I was standing in the kitchen tugging on Lycra, hoping to steal an early bicycle ride, when the phone rang. I jumped at the device like a soldier endeavoring to cover a live hand grenade to protect his platoon. I got to the portable after only half a ring, flicking a quick glance at the clock before I punched the talk button and said, "Hello."

It was 5:38. Early.

"Alan? It's Elliot."

I recognized the patrician voice even before he got to his name. Elliot Bellhaven was one of Lauren's colleagues in the Boulder County District Attorney's Office. I'd met him through Lauren years before when he was new in the DA's office, fresh out of Harvard Law. Over the years Elliot had aged, of course, but I still pictured him in my head as the angel-faced, idealistic kid who'd infused the DA's office with a much needed booster of adrenaline. Recently, though, he'd seemed to become part of the establishment he'd once been so eager to jostle.

"Hey, Elliot," I said. I was waiting for him to tell me the bad news. This wasn't a work call. Lauren hadn't been at work in over six months. This wasn't a social call. It was 5:38 on Sunday morning. Elliot's mother had raised him better than that. Much better than that.

"I'm sorry if I woke you, Alan, but I thought Lauren should hear the news from me rather than someone else."

"You didn't wake me; I was up. What news?"

"Is she awake?"

"Not unless the phone woke her." I tucked the phone between my shoulder and my ear and ambled the two steps to the kitchen television and pressed the power button. The set flickered on to Channel 4, the early local news. A female reporter was doing a stand-up in front of a familiar house-a two-story with a wide lawn and a cheery line of bright yellow crocuses near the street. The graphics on the screen read, "LIVE! Boulder." The reporter was dressed in a maroon turtleneck and looked uncomfortable in the early spring warmth.