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him do his work.”
    McGill wanted to say something reassuring—he knew that he should. Couldn’t quite muster it, though; he just hunched his shoulders in half a shrug, smiled in what amounted to an ambiguous shrug, and made another try for the nursery. The man put his hand on McGill’s shoulder.
    “Hang on there, buddy. This is my boy in there. You won’t touch him, will you?”
    “I’ll put my hand on his head,” said McGill. “No more than that.”
    (McGill stammered when he said that. But it’s mean to mimic a stammer.)
    “No more than that.” The man put his hand on McGill’s arm—around McGill’s arm, really. “You’re gonna wash that hand, then, brother.”
    “Dave!”
    “Shelly.” He kept hold of McGill. His tone was one that he thought was reasonable, but that she had told him more than once was a tone that was “goddamn scary.” Which was all right, she said; it made her feel safe, she said. Protected.
    His grip tightened on McGill’s arm. “This is bullshit.”
    McGill drew in a breath. His arm was hurting, and he was doing his best not to show it. But he wasn’t doing it very well, because she pointed out that he was hurting McGill and shamed him into letting go.
    “It’s all right,” McGill lied. “Your husband—Dave’s right. That is his boy in there, and it’s your boy too. If parents are okay with it, it’s better if it’s just me and the baby. But we can do this with one or both of you in there too. Or I could come back—”
    “No!” she said, too loudly, and then, too softly: “Don’t go, Mr. McGill.”
    Did McGill’s heart melt then? Did more than a decade of hope, of prayer, of dirty, dirty moments alone in his bed at the break of dawn . . . did all that draw together now, at the broken, pleading tone of her voice? Oh, how could it not? Was this not his dream, here before him, made flesh?
    If it didn’t melt—might it not soon shatter?
    “I’ll go in with you,” she said. “Dave will wait here in the kitchen. Right, Dave?”
    “I don’t—”
    “Dave. You promised.”
    And he had, and he knew it, and so that was that.

    When I arrived, the nursery was a cheery space. She had painted the walls little-boy blue, and dangled a mobile of friendly looking farm animals. The changing table was an antique in a tawdry way; it had been a little sheet-metal desk, just the size for a typewriter, an “In” box and a sheaf of paper. This she had painted a bright yellow, covered in terrycloth and stacked diapers and baby powder and a box of wipes. There was a toy box, filled with bric-a-brac from the baby shower, and a chest of drawers, stuffed with more shower swag: jumpers and bonnets and a little denim jacket for baby to wear, eventually. Adorable.
    McGill saw none of that.
    They had stripped the place bare, but for the bassinet. Nothing sharp, nothing heavy. Nothing that could suffocate, and nothing flammable.
    “That’s him,” he said, peering in.
    “That’s my baby.” She said it jauntily enough but she finished on the edge of bitter laughter.
    All business for the moment, McGill took no notice of it.
    He reached into his coat, and pulled out his Pentax, with its smeary lens and etched-in F-stops. He snapped two pictures through that vile instrument, and set it down on the floor. “Don’t touch it,” he said as she leaned to get it. “Please.”
    “All right,” she said.
    He leaned farther over the edge and stared at me. I didn’t look away. He shifted down to his knees and calmed his breathing. He blinked when I blinked. He breathed when I breathed. This went on for a while. How long? I can’t honestly say; this part of things, it’s easy to lose track of time, looking into the pale infinity of McGill’s baby-blues. . . .
    A girl could lose herself in there, don’t you think?
    “Aka Manah,” he said finally.
    “What?” She had been hovering by the door, and now she came closer. He just shook his head and