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faces, had melted beneath her raincoat in a disgusting, sticky pile, and the liquid had pooled around the bottle of wine so that when she lifted it there remained a coagulated white ring around a stark circle of hardwood.
    She came down the next morning to find him making breakfast.
    “To celebrate,” he said, turning to her, a smile arranged dubiously on his face. “I’m really proud of you, Lize. Congratulations.”

    Her eyes filled unexpectedly. She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around him. He turned in her embrace, and she cupped his face in her hands, able, suddenly, to see a glimmer of something she recognized.
    It was less outright desire than a kind of willed optimism, a possibly pathetic longing for what they didn’t have anymore, for the ability to be the kind of couple who easily celebrated each other’s achievements over blueberry pancakes. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d had sex, for she had not been aware, whenever it was, that they were headed somewhere so dark.
    “I’m wet,” she said, and Ryan said, “Why?” and she said, “I don’t know why, ” and they made love against the kitchen counter with an ease and urgency of better times.
    She would try, ardently, not to associate the baby with the day it was conceived.
----
    —
    W endy had left her numerous voicemails after their failed lunch, but Violet waited three days before calling her back. Wyatt was at preschool and Eli was napping and she paced around her first floor as she mustered the confidence to dial the number. Matt had discouraged it over his Grape-Nuts that morning, telling her that Wendy was unfairly fucking with her and that she needn’t engage. And her husband was right, but that didn’t change the fact of the boy. Matt had left without kissing her goodbye. She pressed her fingers into the soil of the pygmy date palm. She’d printed up a watering schedule for the housekeeper, but she had suspicions about Malgorzata’s English literacy and she was afraid that chastisement would be politically incorrect. She went to fill the watering can, aware that she was procrastinating. There was a chance, of course, that the boy wasn’t who she thought he was, but the messages Wendy had been leaving suggested otherwise, as did that feeling in her gut.
    She paused midway to the kitchen and dialed Wendy’s number before she could stop herself. Get it over with, as though calling her sister were the final act rather than the very beginning of what she suspected would be a long sequence of events.
    “Am I hallucinating?” Wendy asked.

    She bristled. “ You actually don’t get to make jokes,” she said to her sister.
    “I’ve called you eighty times. I was starting to think you’d finally transubstantiated.”
    Violet reminded herself that she had a law degree. That she’d once talked a major airline into shelling out seven figures over a case of rancid in-flight OJ. “You had no right,” she said. “You had absolutely no right to put me in that position.”
    “Did you listen to my messages? I know that, Viol, Jesus. I misread the situation.”
    “Are you fucking kidding me?” Her voice hit the vaulted ceiling of the sunroom and bled down the walls. They weren’t a yelling household. She didn’t often get upset. It was embarrassing to hear her own hostility. “Wendy, that was— You know how hard that— The universe in which it’s even remotely okay that you—” She pressed her forehead against the window glass, looked into the yard, at the custom cedar tree house that had convinced them to buy the main house in the first place. She resented this conversation encroaching upon the fine-tuned landscape of her life. She resented all the ways it would inevitably encroach beyond this afternoon. “Tell me how you found him,” she said.
    “It’s kind of a long story,” Wendy said.
    “No shit it is.”
    “I got curious,” Wendy said. “A while ago. And I—did a little digging.”
    “How long