Daniel was bouncing Charlie on his lap, still out of breath from running the twenty blocks from midtown. His glasses had gone askew in the process, giving him a faintly ridiculous, lopsided look even as he nodded seriously at their pediatrician. “Okay, so what can we do to fix that?” he asked.

Dr. Katz looked at their chart. “His intestinal and kidney tests have all been fine, so it’s probably a matter of giving him a higher-calorie diet throughout the day and keeping an eye on it.”

“What about standing up?” Amara asked. “He can put weight on his legs when I hold him, but he doesn’t pull himself up.”

“Uh-oh!” Dr. Katz said, smiling.

“‘Uh-oh’?” Amara asked. “What does that mean?”

“It’s probably nothing to worry about,” he said, patting Charlie’s head. “Some babies are just a little slower than others. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“But what if it does?”

“Well, then we’ll know in a few months!” he said, giving out a kindly chuckle like he was Santa Claus distributing toys. (Here, child, you get a toy train, and you get a Hatchimal, and YOU, little Charlie, get uncertainty about whether or not you’re developing normally! Ho ho ho!)

“Wow. That’s very helpful,” she said. She had an urge to slap some gravitas into him, so, instead, she concentrated on the wall behind Dr. Katz’s head, which was painted with a jungle scene. In the middle of it, a cartoon monkey clutched a vine, grinning. Rather creepy-looking, actually.

“I think,” Daniel said, “we’re just feeling a little overwhelmed right now.”

“Look,” Dr. Katz said, “it seems like your son is what we call, in fancy scientific jargon, a difficult baby. But that doesn’t necessarily last. How’s he sleeping?”

Amara and Daniel looked at each other. “We’re having trouble getting him on a consistent schedule,” she said, “because someone goes into his room when he wakes up in the middle of the night to cuddle him, when he’s supposed to be crying it out.”

“I wait!” Daniel said to her, then turned to Dr. Katz. “I only go in when it really seems like he’s not going to stop. And it works. He goes right back to sleep.”

“It undermines the whole thing,” Amara said.

“Well,” Daniel said, throwing his hands up in the air, “I’m sorry that I want to comfort our son.”

Dr. Katz chuckled again. “Sounds like this is an issue you two should discuss with a different kind of doctor.”

Later, in the hallway, navigating Charlie’s unwieldy stroller through the door that Daniel was holding open, Amara said, “I want to change pediatricians.”

“What?” Daniel asked.

“He’s too flippant,” she said as they headed toward the elevator. “I don’t know if he’s even taking any of our concerns seriously. And I hate his smug face.”

Daniel sighed. “He’s taking us seriously, Mari. I think he’s just seen it all before, so he knows getting worked up over things isn’t helpful.”

“So now you think I’m getting too worked up?” she snapped. He gave her a look, and she deflated. She leaned against him, her voice catching. “I’m sorry. I just feel like I’m trying everything, and I’m failing at it all.”

“Hey,” he said, wrapping his arms around her right there in that sterile hallway, Charlie cooing to himself in the stroller beside them. “You’re not failing.”

“What if there’s something seriously wrong with him?”

“Then we’ll give him away,” he said, his face gentle and somber. She smiled in spite of herself and pushed him. “No,” he said. “Then we’ll have a different kind of life than we planned. But we’ll love him with everything we’ve got and rely on each other, and we’ll make it work.”

“You’re right,” she said, looking at him straight on. When had he gotten such deep bags under his eyes, and all that gray hair at his temples? “I love you. Let’s just go home, order something totally unhealthy, and put an idiotic show on.” She tugged on his tie. “Maybe we’ll even be able to get him to sleep so we can have a little time to ourselves.” She straightened back up and pressed the elevator button.

He grimaced. “I have to go back to the office.”

“What? Now? But it’s already after five.”

“It was the only way I could get out for this appointment.”

“Dammit,” she said, pressing her fingers to her temple. “It would be really nice if just this once, you could tell them to go screw themselves.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Looks like it’s me and Charlie, alone again. Cool.”

“It’s not like I wanted to be the only breadwinner,” Daniel snapped, right as the elevator doors dinged open.

The car was packed with people, with just enough space at the front for the two of them. But Charlie’s stroller would never fit. “You go,” she said to Daniel. “You have to get back to the office.”

“Mari . . .”

“Go.”

So he went.

She had to let two more carfuls of people go by before she was able to shove herself and Charlie in there. Having a baby in New York City was an insane thing to do, much like skydiving or cutting off one’s ear. But she’d gone ahead and done it anyway.

 

* * *

 

—

Amara was this close to getting promoted to showrunner when Daniel went and put a fucking bun in her oven. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely his fault. They only used condoms, even after five years together, because Amara didn’t like putting extra hormones in her body—she was perfectly balanced the way she was, thank you very much, and didn’t need to go back to the girl she’d been when she went on the pill her senior year of secondary school, crying on the tube every morning for no reason she could name—and when she’d tried an IUD her first year in New York, she’d suffered through a month of bleeding and cramps and then it had slipped without her realizing, meaning she’d had to take a very unpleasant trip to Planned Parenthood. She wasn’t going to suffer through more horrible side effects just so her boyfriend (turned fiancé turned husband) could feel extra mind-blowingly amazing, when he already got to feel pretty damn good. Luckily Daniel wasn’t one of those guys who whined about that sort of thing. She couldn’t have married a guy who did.

Their condom broke the night before a gigantic presentation at work. She was one of the producers at Staying Up with Nick Tannenbaum, and she’d been developing a new segment for the show in which Nick would have a rap-battle debate about current events with the celebrity guest. She was always pushing for more substance, especially with the state of the world as it was. Nick, an affable Canadian, got nervous about handling controversial issues, but he loved goofing around and freestyle rapping with the crew backstage, so she thought he just might go for it. She’d written up a script about abolishing the electoral college (when she’d come over from England for university, she’d been dumbfounded by the institution—how was this the “great American democracy” she’d heard so much about?—but she tried to be evenhanded in the writing), and convinced the show’s bandleader, Kenny, to do one side while she incessantly practiced the other. She knew Nick would get a kick out of that too, if she managed to do it well. He always tried to get her to join in on the freestyling backstage when she was running around making sure a million other things were going the way they were supposed to. “Amara could probably kick all of our asses,” he’d say. (She wasn’t sure if he was saying that because she was black or if it was a joke because she was so no-nonsense or if he actually meant it.) “I’d destroy you. You’d go home crying to your mummies,” she’d always say while double-checking that the space cadet of an intern had put the cue cards in the proper order.