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life with Joe. Now I tried to guide it to the few conversations we’d had about Paige, digging up the same information I’d once tossed into the No Need to Dwell pile. Back then, I didn’t want to live in the past, not his or mine. I didn’t ask the questions because I didn’t want to know the answers.
    But I had wanted to make sure their ending was final, that there was no chance they could get back together. The last thing I wanted to be was a home wrecker.
    At the house that first night I met Joe, the only evidence of Paige that I’d noticed was her bathrobe, and when I returned the next evening after a day of job hunting, the bathrobe was gone. Joe must have emptied the house of everything Paige, because I never found another indication that she existed, except for the one photograph of her pregnant.
    ‘Four months ago,’ Joe had said in his one offer of explanation soon after we met, ‘while the kids and I were at my mom’s for Sunday brunch, she packed up all her things.’ We had been lying in bed, a candle flame still creating moving shadows on the wall, long after our own shadows had stilled. ‘She took all her clothes except her bathrobe, which she’d practically been living in.’
    He said Paige had been depressed. She got to the point that she’d forget to change clothes and take a shower. She went to live with her aunt in a trailer park outside of Las Vegas, so at least he knew someone was taking care of her. It was hard for me to imagine someone choosing a trailer park in the desert, leaving behind all the natural beauty of Elbow, the cosy home, let alone Joe and Annie and Zach. But she wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t talk to him. She’d left him a Dear Joe letter.
    ‘She said she was sorry but that she wasn’t meant to be a mother. That the kids would be better off without her. She said she loved them but she wasn’t good for them. She told me she knew I could do this, that I was a natural father in all the ways she wasn’t a natural mother, that my family would help me . . . blah, blah, fucking blah.’
    ‘It’s ironic,’ I told him. I thought about keeping my own failures, well, my own, but I’d already blown every dating rule, so there was no point in stopping then. ‘I’ve wanted to have children, but I haven’t been able to. I was depressed and lethargic, too . . . My ex-husband could tell you similar stories about me wearing the same clothes for three days and forgetting to bathe.’
    I told him about the five babies that didn’t make it. We held each other tighter, as if our embrace could serve as a perfectly fitted cast that could help heal all the broken parts of us.
    My mom had slept on the couch, had a fire going in the woodstove, and was already making coffee and oatmeal, toast and eggs, when I got up. My mother stood in my kitchen in her robe and moccasins, looking like an older version of me – tall, slim, a bit of a hippie – except her braid was salt-and-pepper. I got my red hair from my dad. She held out her arms to me, her silver bracelets clinking, and I entered her hug. Because her husband – my dad – had died when I was eight, she’d been through this, she knew things, but some of them couldn’t be spoken. I loved my mother, but we’d never had the kind of mother–daughter relationship my friends shared with their moms. I’d never screamed that I hated her; we didn’t go through that necessary separation of selves where I declared my individuality, because, truth be told, the shadow cast by my father’s death always loomed between us, keeping us polite and slightly distant. Still, I loved her. I admired her. And I wished, in a way, that I’d felt passionate and comfortable enough to dump my rage and teenage angst on her. Instead, I’d pecked her on the cheek and closed the door to my room and finished my biology homework.
    I poured myself coffee and refilled my mom’s cup. Outside, the fog hadn’t budged since the previous night; the cold grey