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her nerves.
    “Let’s get you packed!” she said.
    Beside the bed stood her own stuffed suitcase, the hand-me-down Louis Vuitton her aunt Ann Marie had given her for study abroad over a decade earlier, angering Maggie’s mother but delighting Maggie herself. She had brought it from her apartment the night before. She would be staying with him again tonight, and they would leave around noon the next day, after he wrapped up an early shoot. He wanted to spend two nights in a row with her before the trip—this in itself was a good sign, since Gabe was the type who needed his space. Until recently, she had gotten used to having to lobby for their time together, but maybe that was changing now.
    He laughed into his pillow. “Maggie, it’s dawn. We’re not leaving until tomorrow,” he said.
    Really it was almost ten, but she decided to leave it, getting up to make coffee. Usually he woke before she did, and often had breakfast ready by the time she got out of bed—Denver omelets and hash browns and sausage and waffles, all served together, as if they were a couple of truckers. She had gained seven pounds since they had started dating two years earlier, though he didn’t seem to notice.
    In the kitchen, she looked out the window at a homeless man dragging his cart along the sidewalk, a group of hipsters in tight dark jeans sharing a cigarette on a graffiti-covered stoop across the way. She had never been able to see the beauty in this neighborhood, no matter how much Gabe praised it. She wondered, not for the first time, how it was going to feel to leave her lovely tree-lined Brooklyn Heights, with its streets of perfect brownstones, the view of the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge from the Promenade, the Sunday farmers’ market where she and Gabe had so often gone in early autumn to buy fresh vegetables, and apple crisp, and dahlias for the fire escape, which she could never manage to keep alive for long.
    It was hard to imagine living here, in a neighborhood meant for young late-night partiers, a neighborhood full of dive bars and concrete. Especially with a child. Or maybe they would move again by then, someplace quieter and more kid friendly. Park Slope perhaps.
    Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought that maybe they wouldn’t ever have a life together, and this whole situation would turn out to be an extension of her foolish history with men—huge, impossible hopes that eventually came to nothing.
    Maggie hadn’t told anyone that she was pregnant, even though she had known for nearly two weeks. There were plenty of moments when she panicked and picked up the phone to call her mother or her best friend, Allegra, but she resisted. Gabe should be first.
    Never in her life had her emotions run so hot and cold—she could talk herself into the possibility of this being a superb idea and feel at ease for all of three minutes, before completely freaking out and deciding she’d made the biggest mistake of her life.
    She knew exactly how it had happened. For months, she had been thinking about babies. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, she wanted one, and understood for the first time what women meant when they talked about biological clocks. She found herself gazing longingly at toddlers on the subway or at brunch. At certain points in each month, she thought she might kidnap the closest person in a high chair.
    Maggie knew that she and Gabe weren’t exactly ready. But one night in mid-April, they had a long, winding freshman-year-of-college-type talk about the way events unfold, how, as her mother often said, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. They were both artists in their way, and they ascribed so much meaning, too much, to how they’d met. Gabe said that their next chapter could likely be as random, as accidental, as fated, however you chose to look at it. That night at eleven, when she was supposed to take her pill as she had done every night at eleven since her first year