But I liked the Black Cat. It reminded me of the unapologetic cafés around Columbia that Justin and I had frequented when we first started dating.

I ordered a full-fat latte and sat in the window. In fifteen minutes, I had a decent draft. It was short, under a hundred and fifty words. My interview with Steve had been exclusive because it was first. That didn’t mean he’d given me much new to say.

I read through the post one last time. Satisfied, I emailed it off to Erik with a note: Extended print story to come. But extended how, exactly? I was pondering how I’d flesh it out as I headed to get another latte. I ran smack into Nancy on her way out the door.

“Oh, hi, Molly,” she said, smiling, but with none of her usual ease.

Her face was drawn and her eyes were puffy. Her long dark blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail that looked slept on. She seemed very much like somebody in the midst of a family crisis.

“It’s terrible what’s happened with that baby,” she said, sadness and sympathy flicking across her face. “Erik told me that you’re covering it.”

I couldn’t tell whether Nancy was upset for herself or concerned for me. We’d never spoken about the baby I’d lost, but I could tell she was thinking about it. And after all she and Erik had been through—three miscarriages, followed by two rounds of unsuccessful IVF, one larcenous surrogate, and an already arduous and still unsuccessful adoption process—a dead baby must have triggered all sorts of strong emotions for her, too. I wanted to ask if she was okay. But everything I thought about saying felt presumptuous and awkward.

“I’m trying,” I said, feeling myself well up. It was that caring look in Nancy’s eyes. It did it to me every time. “It’s terrible. I feel terrible for—well, everyone involved.”

Nancy nodded, then mercifully looked away, toward the Ridgedale town green. But she lingered while I waited in line, as if she wanted to say something else. After a while, it started to feel uncomfortable with her standing there, not saying anything.

“I hope everything is okay with your family,” I said, compelled to fill the void.

Nancy turned sharply in my direction. “What do you mean?”

Dammit. Why had I said anything? There I’d gone, hooking myself on all that invisible barbed wire again. What if Erik was off somewhere on a bender or something that Nancy didn’t know about? Elizabeth told me once that she’d spotted Erik at Blondie’s, a dive bar downtown. But she added that she’d been very drunk herself—“totally wasted,” as if she were sixteen instead of twenty-six—so I hadn’t taken it seriously. But judging from the look on Nancy’s face, there was something complicated going on.

“I’m sorry, I thought Erik said he had to go out of town for something family-related. I may have misunderstood. This story has me pretty distracted.”

“No, no, you’re right,” Nancy said quickly. She smiled again, even less convincingly. “It’s Erik’s cousin. There was a fire at his house, bad wiring. No one was hurt, but the family lost everything. Thank you for asking.” She looked around as if searching for someone or something to grab on to, but she came up empty-handed. She checked her watch. When she looked back at me, her eyes had softened, filled with compassion, not pity. She squeezed my arm. “I should probably be going. You take care of yourself, Molly. And don’t work too hard.”

“I won’t,” I said, turning away so she didn’t see the tears that had rushed crazily to my eyes. “Thanks, it was nice to see you.”

I watched Nancy’s tired face disappear past the front windows and Justin appear in her place. I scrubbed my face with my hands, trying to rub away the incriminating weepiness as Justin stepped inside. He was wearing jeans, Vans, and an untucked, slightly wrinkled button-down—a young literature professor’s uniform.

“Hey there.” He wrapped an arm around my waist and leaned over to kiss me. “Everything okay?”

“Yes.” I tried to smile. “And no.”

He nodded sympathetically. And he didn’t know the half of it yet. “Why don’t you go sit? I’ll get your coffee for you,” he said. “A latte?”

I smiled. “Sure.”

I went back and sat down, watching Justin’s quick back-and-forth with the girl behind the counter. She had a plain square face and an athlete’s sturdy frame. She laughed too loudly at whatever Justin said as he motioned to the baked goods. Preternaturally charming—men, women, old, young. Justin couldn’t help himself.

I’d known that since the day we met. I was at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, an old-school no-frills café near Columbia, studying constitutional criminal procedure, listening to Justin a couple tables away, chatting up the sixtysomething man sitting near him. Apparently they shared an intense interest in collecting. In the older man’s case, it was mechanical banks; for Justin, it was bottle caps.

“Do you collect anything?” Justin had asked me once the man was gone.

“No,” I said, trying not to notice just how good-looking he was.

“Me, neither,” Justin said.

“I just heard you telling that man—”

“See, I knew you were listening,” he said with a sly smile that made him even better-looking. “Anyway, no. No collecting. I was just making conversation.”

“So you were lying,” I said.

According to my law school friend Leslie, a cheerful guy’s-girl soccer player who never had a shortage of boyfriends, this was why men never called me for a second date: I was a hard-ass. Too serious, too exacting. Humorless. I needed to let some of their harmless male bullshit flow over me; men didn’t want to be called out for every little thing. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. My whole life, friends—men especially—had been telling me how much luckier in love I would be if I’d lighten up. Sometimes I wanted to defend myself, to ask how many of them had grown up like me. Because the truth was: I would choose alone any day over angry like my mother.

As it turned out, Justin fell in love with my sharpest edges. He genuinely valued my willingness to call him out on his particular brand of bullshit.

“I’d say I was just being friendly,” Justin had said that day in the café. “But I guess that depends on how you see the world.”

And as much as Justin valued the clarity of my black and white, I’d been intoxicated by his world of grays. By his fearlessness and his freedom and his very modest sense of entitlement. Justin had never believed that he needed to be right 100 percent of the time to be a decent person; he didn’t need to be perfect to be loved. As it turned out, I wanted to feel that way also, much more than I’d ever let myself believe.

No doubt it had been easier for Justin with Judith and Charles, his generous parents, celebrating every milestone big and small in his picture-perfect house in New Canaan, Connecticut. With his accomplished and loving sister, Melissa, at his side, Justin had played lacrosse and swum competitively. He spent summers on the Cape and winter holidays in Vail. He had a golden retriever named Honey. And thank God for the relentless optimism those things had given Justin. Without that, I never would have had the courage to forge ahead with him on a family of our own.

“Not everything about where you’re headed, Molly, has to be about where you’ve been,” he’d told me once when we’d been deep in the throes of debating getting pregnant the first time.

And I’d believed him, proof of just how much I’d loved him.

“It’s a baby,” I blurted out when Justin returned with our coffees. So much for playing it cool. He hadn’t even sat down.

“What?” Justin looked confused.

“The body they found,” I said. “It’s a baby.”

His face was stiff as he lowered himself into the chair across from me. “Well, that’s a completely upsetting turn of events.”

“Tell me about it.”

He turned his coffee cup in his hands. His face was tighter. He was trying hard not to overreact, but he was worried. It was obvious.