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began.
    “Shh,” he said. “Come on.”
    So she lay in the crook of his arm and looked up at the stars. The air was soft and velvety, and though Peter smelled as bad as she did and the grass was itchy under her legs—at least she hoped it was grass and not the angry occupants of an anthill—a slight breeze cooled her skin.
    “Was this a mistake?” she whispered. “I thought we needed a change, but maybe Vermont isn’t the answer.”
    Peter sighed. “I don’t know.”
    We’re stuck, she thought, feeling fear grip her chest. They’d quit their jobs, sublet their apartment, and bequeathed their goldfish to a neighbor’s little girl. Maybe instead of leaping into something new, they should’ve analyzed their life to see where it had gone off track. How could Peter be thinking about having a baby, creating a new life, when they didn’t even know which direction their own would take?
    But she hadn’t felt like analyzing, endlessly discussing, and carefully weighing the pros and cons. She’d lived her entire life that way. Just once, she’d wanted to be spontaneous and impractical—to leap headfirst into a thrilling new experience. Like Rand and Alyssa were always doing.
    Fine, so she was a little jealous. It was hard to escape her envy when she’d schlep home, her feet aching and her mind feeling simultaneously jittery and dull from too much caffeine and too little sleep, to discover Peter turning over a postcard with a palm tree or Mayan temple pictured on the front. “Rand and Alyssa are taking up cliff diving,” Peter would say, reading off the back of the postcard. Or “They decided to go to Guadalajara for a month after they finish building a Habitat for Humanity house in Honduras.”
    Sometimes Rand would e-mail a photo instead, and Kira couldn’t help but notice that Alyssa had the kind of long, sleek hair nature had denied Kira, and the toned body of a yoga devotee. Alyssa always seemed to be tanned, smiling, and free from the worries that jarred Kira awake at three on the nights when she was the most exhausted.
    That was why she’d spent days deep-cleaning the carpets and washing down the baseboards before she’d labored over the Thanksgiving dinner she’d served them. She wanted them to admire the lovely home she’d created, even if it was just a rental apartment, and be awed by the juicy, brined turkey and rhubarb-apple pie she’d concocted. She wanted to show off a snapshot of her life with Peter at its best, too.
    “It’s only a year,” Peter was saying now. He yawned and stretched his back.
    Kira nodded. They still had their savings, and a small 401(k), and she’d put most of her paychecks toward paying off her school loans, so she now owed only about ten thousand dollars.
    “One year,” she repeated, the words carried out on a sigh.
    The next twelve months would be a kind of life pause for them, breathing room to figure out what they really wanted. Kira knew, for Peter, that meant a family. He’d often talked about having three or even four kids, while Kira thought two seemed like plenty. She needed to figure out a way to tell Peter she wanted to get through this year before they shook up their lives again. It wasn’t that she disliked kids. But something she couldn’t identify was holding her back; she didn’t feel ready yet for a child of her own. She dreaded having that conversation.
    She sighed and stared up at the full, bright moon overhead.
    • • •
    The bright overhead fluorescent lights pierced Alyssa’s eyes. She stood in the aisle of the sprawling megastore and stifled a scream. She was starving. She felt dizzy. She desperately wanted to be anywhere but here.
    She steered her cart down another aisle—naturally she’d gotten a cart with a faulty wheel that required her to hurl herself against it every few steps to keep it moving—and looked around as a headache clamped down on her temples. She was in the wrong place again; she needed sheets, and this aisle was