But I had a family: Momma and Daddy and Lily. I didn’t want another one.

Lily got swept up in an instant because she was two years old. Infertile couples, like Paul and Lily Zeeger, were looking for just that. A baby, if possible, but a toddler if a baby was hard to find. Little Lily barely remembered Momma and Daddy. In time, she wouldn’t remember them at all. She’d come to believe that Paul and Lily were her parents.

But no one wanted a nine-year-old, and sure as heck, no one would want a ten-year-old or an eleven-year-old, either. Time was ticking away, or so my caseworker, Ms. Amber Adler, said.

I packed what few belongings I’d been allowed to bring with me: some clothes and books, the photos of Momma that Joseph would later tear to shreds.

“And Joseph. Is he a troll, too?”

I pictured Joseph in my mind. The towering man, the sinister eagle eyes and aquiline nose, his short, military-style pumpkin-colored hair and the bristly beard that kept me awake at night, as I lay on my bed, listening in fear for the sound of unwelcome footsteps on the creaky wooden floor outside my door.

The bristly beard scraping across my face when he lay down beside me in bed.

“No,” I said, looking the silver-haired lady straight in the eye. “No, ma’am. Joseph’s the devil.”

HEIDI

I can’t stop thinking about it, about the blood.

As I pass my neighbor, Graham, on the way up from the laundry room, I’m unsettled, incognizant of the way he says to me in that always jovial, always dependable tone of his, “You just get more and more beautiful every time I lay eyes on you,” and I have to ask him to repeat himself.

“What’s that?” I ask and he laughs.

I’m reminded of my robe and messy hair, the fact that I have yet to shower. I can feel the hallway spinning and I wonder when the last time was that I ate. I lay an unsteady hand on the wall and study Graham coming at me, completely unaffected by personal space. He is impeccable as always, in a pullover sweater with a half zip, a pair of dark wash jeans, leather loafers.

But somehow or other, I believe Graham, though I know I look an atrocious mess, I believe him when his eyes come to a standstill on mine and he tells me that I look beautiful. His eyes look me up and down as if proving it to be true. He grabs me playfully, by the hand, and begs me to go out with him tonight, to keep him company at some god-awful engagement party at Cafe Spiaggia. I can’t imagine Graham without a date in tow, some stunning blonde in a little black dress and four-inch heels.

My hands are shaking out of control, and seeing this, Graham asks if I’m feeling all right. There’s this sudden urge to fold into Graham’s sweater, to bury my face into the heather gray and tell him about the girl. The baby. The blood.

His eyes show concern, the space between his eyebrows all puckered up so that a crease runs vertically between them. He holds my gaze, trying hard to read what I won’t say, until I’m forced to look away.

He can see that something isn’t quite right, can sense that Heidi Wood, who always has everything under control, is coming undone.

“Fine,” I lie. “I feel fine.”

Physically, the truth, but emotionally, a lie. I cannot get the blood out of my mind, the sight of the yeast infection devouring the baby’s bottom, Chris’s eyes suggesting that what I’m doing—helping this poor girl who desperately needs help—is wrong. The image of baby Juliet that has returned to me after all these years in exile.

Graham doesn’t cave so easily. He doesn’t move on as others would do, taking my words at face value. He continues to stare until I repeat, with an obligatory smile this time, that I am fine. And after some time he concedes.

“Then come with me,” he says, as he pulls on my hand and I feel my feet drag down the carpeted hall. I laugh. Graham can always make me laugh.

“I want to,” I say. “You know I want to.”

“Then come. Please. You know I hate small talk,” he claims but nothing could be further from the truth.

“I’m in my robe, Graham.”

“We’ll stop off at Tribeca. Find you something sumptuous to wear.”

“I haven’t done sumptuous in years.”

“Then something pretty and practical,” he concedes, but I’m drawn to the suggestion of sumptuous, the idea of masquerading around town as Graham’s date. I find myself wondering, often, why it is that Graham’s still single, and whether or not he, as Chris insists, is gay. Are all the gorgeous women simply a cover, a security blanket of some sort?

“You know I can’t,” I say, and his eyes take on a crestfallen look before he bids me adieu and saunters off down the hall alone.

I pause beside my own door, dwelling on it all, letting the fairy tale exist for just a split second longer before reality throws a monkey wrench to it: Graham and sumptuous attire from Tribeca, dinner at Cafe Spiaggia. Me on Graham’s arm, posing as his date.

Back inside, Willow is sitting on the edge of the pull-out sofa, holding the baby. She’s dressed in Zoe’s garb, the wet towel returned to a bathroom hook. “My clothes,” she says, in a panic. “What did you do with my clothes? They’re not...” her voice is shaking. Her eyes unsteady. That rickety way she rocks the baby, more spasmodic than calming.

“I’m washing them,” I interrupt, seeing panic rise up inside her swollen blue eyes. “There were some stains,” I admit, quietly, quickly, so Chris, down the hall at the kitchen table, will not hear. I stare at her, willing her to explain so that I will not have to ask her outright about the blood. I don’t want her and her baby to leave, but if Willow’s being here is dangerous for Zoe, for my family, then I cannot allow her to stay. Were it up to Chris, she would already be halfway out the door.

But instead, I stare at her, solicitously, begging her to explain. Explain the blood. Something innocent, I pray for something...

“A bloody nose,” she interjects then, disrupting my thoughts. “I get bloody noses,” and she peers toward the ground, as people do when they are nervous or perhaps, when they are lying. “I had nothing to wipe it on,” she says, “just the shirt,” and I consider the cold spring air, aggravating the nasal tissues, making them bleed.

“A bloody nose?” I ask, and she nods her head meekly.

“A bloody nose, then,” I say, “that explains it,” and with that I walk out of the room.

WILLOW

Matthew told me once that what his father intended to do, long before he married Miriam, was go into the seminary and become a Catholic priest. But then he got Miriam knocked up, and all hopes of the priesthood vanished in the air. Just like that.

“Knocked up?” I asked Matthew. I was young, like maybe ten or eleven years old. I knew what sex was; that Joseph taught me though he didn’t go as far as to give it a name, what it was he was doing when he came into my room at night. What I didn’t know was that what Joseph did when he lay on top of me, crushing me to the bed, a rubbery, wet hand pressed against my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, was the same thing that led to babies.

“Yeah,” he shrugged. Matthew was six years older than me and knew things that I didn’t. Lots of things. “You know. Pregnant.”

“Oh,” I said, still not sure how knocked up and pregnant had a darn thing to do with Joseph not becoming a priest.

Matthew rolled his eyes. “Duh.”

But that all came later, much later.

At first Matthew and Isaac, the both of them, wouldn’t have a thing to do with me. Joseph forbade it. Forbade them from talking to me. Forbade them from looking at me. Just like me, Isaac and Matthew weren’t allowed to do much of anything. There was no TV, no playing ball or riding bikes with the neighborhood kids, no listening to music, no books—none other than the Bible, of course—and when Matthew and Isaac came home from school with something or other to read, Joseph would hold it up disapprovingly and call it blasphemous.