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at Kenyon, she left it in the package instead. She did the same the next night and the next, before panicking and swallowing all four pills in one gulp on the fourth night.
    After the initial shock of it, this crazy, exhilarating game of Russian roulette, she waited, without telling Gabe what she had done. Her period never came. She took a home pregnancy test. Even though she probably shouldn’t have, she felt stunned when the result was positive. All you heard about in New York these days was how impossible it was to get pregnant. How could she have accomplished it in a single try?
    Hiding the pregnancy test from Gabe was one thing, but she knew there was something truly, deeply, wildly wrong with her when she found herself making a doctor’s appointment, sitting across from her middle-aged female gynecologist in a paper gown calmly talking about prenatal vitamins, and then going to meet Gabe for dinner afterward as if none of it had happened. They had even had sex that night.
    On average, they did it six times a week, a fact that stunned her group of friends from back home in Massachusetts, most of whom were married, as well as Allegra, her best friend from college, who considered herself exceedingly liberated in every way, but found this amazing even so.
    There was an electricity between them that never diminished, even when they were fighting. So Maggie couldn’t be sure when it had happened. For some reason, this seemed important, a real omission on her part. She remembered them having sex in the shower that second day with no pill—she was bent forward with her foot up on the edge of the tub, and he stood behind. She cringed thinking about it. That was no way to make a child. She knew this was the least of her problems, but it seemed like a sign of just how unfit they were to become parents.
    Then again, they weren’t teenagers. It wasn’t exactly a scandal for two people in their thirties to have a baby, even if it wasn’t planned. They could do this. She thought she could, at least.
    She decided that she would tell him in Maine. There, he’d have time to process, time to get accustomed to the idea. Maybe he would be happy.
    Gabe knew she wanted children someday in some abstract way, though they had never really talked about kids. But Gabe was impetuous. He made decisions on a whim, and managed to be happy with them— move to New York, leave New York, come back to New York . She herself had never been that way, but he brought it out in her, which perhaps accounted for that business with the pills. She hadn’t been sick at all so far and she took this, at least, as a good omen.
    Maggie turned away from the window and pulled two mugs from the cabinet over the sink. She filled Gabe’s with coffee and poured cranberry juice into her own. She had stopped drinking caffeine two weeks earlier, and no one had noticed. She wasn’t drinking booze either, but she hardly ever did that anyway. She was mindful of the family history around drinking—her mother had dragged her along to enough AA meetings as a child, presumably because she couldn’t find a sitter, but more likely as a sort of cautionary tale. As a result, all these years later Maggie rarely had more than a single glass of wine during the course of a night. She had never been drunk in her life, aside from two or three times with her extended family at Christmas.
    For months, she had been looking forward to Maine. She could almost smell the ocean. The cottage and her grandmother’s house next door were built on three acres of grassy land. Beyond those was a stretch of sand and miles of dark blue sea. You couldn’t make out a thing on the other side. As a little girl, Maggie believed that the world dropped off out there, that if you swam far enough you might fall into a starry sky.
    She and Gabe had had a marvelous time the previous summer. They did all the activities Maggie had loved to do with her family as a child. They lay on the beach reading for hours;