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deserve this.”
    “But you’ve been wonderful parents, Joe,” I said. What would Elaine say here? I tried to channel my wife. “To all four of your kids, you’ve been wonderful parents.”
    “I’m an obstetrician, Pete, and I didn’t even see my own daughter’s pregnancy.”
    “She wore baggy clothes — you said it yourself.”
    “I would have sworn on my life she was a virgin.”
    “Come on.”
    He pinched the bridge of his nose. If he cried—well, that made sense. Had it been me, maybe I would have cried, too. Alec was eight years old back then and the idea that my own child could be a stranger to me while he lived in my house, that while I worked to keep him warm and clothed and fed, he could harbor terrified secrets — I thought of Alec’s fragile shoulders, his bowl of silky brown hair. I thought of the way he murmured in his sleep, fragments of television commercials, Top 40 songs.
    “We’ll spirit her to Mexico. You’ll help us, Pete. You’ll help us get her out.”
    I nodded. There was nothing to say but, “Of course.”
    “We’ve got her on antidepressants. Now Iris is taking them, too. Maybe I’ll start. They don’t seem to be helping that much, but I like the idea of medicating my way out of this.”
    “Do you think you’re depressed, Joe?”
    “I’m not depressed.” He rolled up his napkin in his hand. “I’m just sad.”
    My omelet, flecked with red and pink and green, looked garish, ridiculous, barely like food. I picked up my fork, poked at it.
    “At least the kids don’t know what’s going on. I mean, Neal knows something’s up, and we’ve tried to ask around it, to see how muchhe’s figured out. But he just thinks Laura’s sick, and he doesn’t want to know more than that, thank God.”
    “Thank God.”
    “Something like this, it’s so beyond them. It’s so beyond us—how couldn’t it be beyond them? How could they even understand it? How could we explain it to them?”
    “Of course you’re not going to talk to a second-grader about what happened.”
    He looked at me sharply. “You don’t talk to your kids, that’s how they get in trouble, Pete.”
    “Yeah, but—”
    “You gotta talk to them. You’ve got to know what’s going on.”
    “In the second grade?”
    “You underestimate your kids, they’ll crush you. They’ll crush you with what you never could have expected.”
    As for me, I thought there was a big space between underestimating your kids and terrifying them, and Joe’s sweet-faced little babies — let them be the last people in Round Hill not to know what Laura had done. When Pauline was born, four years earlier, we’d delighted that there was another baby girl; we slicked Alec’s hair and put him in a button-down shirt for Pauline’s naming at Temple Beth Shalom. I remember watching him watch the newborn little girl and jealously eyeing Neal, who was protective about his new sister. “How come Neal gets one?” He tugged at my sleeve. “How come Neal gets a sister and I don’t?”
    I shook my head. So many times in this life I’ve had no idea what to say. But then I had an inspiration. “You know, if you ask nicely, maybe Neal will share his.”
    Kids hate to share. “Why can’t I have my own?”
    “Because you’re our one and only.” This was lame, I knew, but he seemed to take it okay, plugged his thumb in his mouth, and I was hugely grateful for this odd moment of complacency.
    I wanted to find Laura Stern and shake her, hard. Her parents would have taken the baby in.
We
would have taken her in.
    “She wasn’t viable.” Joe took a bite of his oatmeal, put the spoon down still half-full. “That’s the thing of it. She wasn’t viable. The autopsy proved it.”
    “Conclusively?” I said. “Well, that’s good, right?”
    “I’ve seen babies like that, Pete, underweight, underdeveloped lungs,” he said. “Even if you stick ’em in a NICU for fifteen weeks, there’s no guarantee they’ll survive. They’re