An unexpected wind picks up from the north and the wall of fire becomes a living thing, a dragon roaring toward the first responders who try to tame it. I’m frozen in place, watching this hellscape. These thirty-mile-per-hour gusts have seemingly arrived out of, well, thin air.

The flames lick to the sky and then swoop back against the crashed Southwest jet, making it harder to see the passengers still trapped inside. Smoke rolls across the tarmac and heat beats against my face. My phone buzzes incessantly: Alert 3 at TF Green; plane has crashed on runway, on fire, evacuating passengers; plus calls to nearby police and EMS and fire departments for mutual aid. There’s a scream of sirens as two ladder engines from the Warwick Fire Department join forces with the struggling firemen from the Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting Team, spraying the chemical foam used to extinguish jet fuel.

A dozen EMTs stand at a safe distance like runners at a gate, raring for the go-ahead to treat the passengers, but there’s no way to get them out of the plane until the fire’s been subdued. Which would have happened by now if the wind hadn’t changed direction. This is quickly becoming an even greater disaster.

As the Chief of the Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response at the Rhode Island Department of Health, I was among the first to be notified about the crash. By the time I ran out the door to get to the Emergency Operations Center at the airport, I was already texting my team. My deputy chief, Toby, had put out the initial notification to all Rhode Island hospitals: A plane has crashed at TF Green. Estimated 168 souls on board. EMS is assessing. Please provide your bed availability. The more time they had to determine their capacity, call in their trauma teams, clear beds in the emergency department, or prep the burn cart, the better.

A whip of wind blows some of my hair out of my braid. By the time I brush it from my eyes, the yellow tongue of the evacuation slide has deployed.

Shit.

While we need to get the passengers safely cleared, having them slide through an active blaze is a mistake. But the EMTs surge forward, and passengers begin deplaning. The airport fire chief grimaces, then directs his team to pivot so they can create a physical barrier between the slide and the flames.

Passengers reach the tarmac, sobbing. A flight attendant shepherds a woman with a piece of metal protruding from her upper arm. One middle-aged man sees the fire and panics, racing in the opposite direction. Another stumbles toward the firefighters, hands clasped over his eyes, shrieking in pain.

A pumper truck arrives, along with the first ambulances. The triage coordinator—an EMT at the bottom of the evacuation slide—evaluates each passenger. Those who can walk get directed to the Temporary Reception Center, a tent where a Southwest rep will check them in and make them as comfortable as possible until law enforcement can interview them. Passengers who can’t move lie on the ground, moaning, or—worse—in silence. Paramedics pinball between victims, tagging them with triage tape—red, yellow, and green.

Although I’ve been doing this job for six years, every disaster feels like the first time. The minutes pass differently. It seems to take eons until the fire is subdued, foam coating the plane and the tarmac below. By then, anyone able to get off the plane by themself has been evacuated, and firefighters have deployed ladders to rescue those who remain. Injured passengers litter the tarmac like a macabre quilt. An ambulance zooms into view, and two paramedics leap out with a backboard. They rush to a teenage girl, red-tagged and unmoving, her head haloed by a puddle of blood.

I find myself staring at the spill of red; the horror it evokes. In situations like this, it’s hard to remember what is real and what isn’t.

The Teams app on my phone pings with a member of my department who has been monitoring social media. There was a very pregnant woman on board. Anyone have eyes on her?

A flurry of responses scroll in—nos from the Temporary Reception Center and the transport officer. Has someone already found her? Is she still on the plane? My gaze roams over the wounded, falling on a woman with her back to me, a yellow tag on her shirt and burns on her arms. When she rolls to the side, I see a swollen belly.

She lets out an unearthly groan.

Before I can even text that I’ve found her, an EMT rushes over. He replaces her yellow strip of tape with a red one. “I need transport now,” he shouts.

My phone rings—the call I have been waiting for. “The manifest is in,” says Sue, a Southwest Airlines rep, referring to the list of crew and passengers. “Meet at the EOC?”

The Emergency Operations Center is located in a nearby maintenance building with windows that overlook the scene. The room is jammed with people.

I take a seat beside Sue. She pulls up the manifest on her phone as I pull up the patient tracking system—which allows me to see who's been transported by ambulance, and where, for the last four hours. There are so many legal issues around turning over a list to Southwest that best practice is to sit next to each other and read off names.

A guy from EMS who only started a month ago—Robert? Roger?—blusters in. “Sorry I’m late,” he apologizes. “State police just showed up.” He clutches the third master list—the dossier of who is or was sitting on the tarmac, and who has been cataloged at the Temporary Reception Center. By cross-referencing the three documents, we make sure that everyone has been accounted for.

Sometimes, it’s how we figure out who is dead, too.

We start the reconciliation with Sue reading the names of the crew. The pilot and copilot are on Roger’s list with minor injuries treated in the field. The flight attendants have all been accounted for, one having been sent to South County Hospital and the rest still in the Temporary Reception Center. “Alice Kennedy,” Sue reads, and I scan my tracking system.

“Sent to Roger Williams Medical Center,” I reply. Roland Gresham. Chinara Adebayo. Alika Adebayo.

“Minh Neuyen?”

I scroll and scroll but cannot find that name.

Roger is flipping through a spreadsheet on his laptop. “Negative,” he says finally.

From the background chatter behind us, the deputy chief of EMS interrupts. “Sorry, did you say Nguyen?” Paul asks. “We have a Neuyen ID'd as a decedent.”

Sue checks her manifest. “First name?”

He shakes his head. “Don’t have it.”

“This one is a twenty-six-year-old female?”

Paul hunches away, speaking into a radio before turning back to us. “Mine’s an elderly man,” he replies.

Sue nods, moving down the manifest list and putting a check mark next to another Nguyen.

“Ah, got her,” Roger says. “Minh Nguyen. Her name was misspelled. Uninjured and checked in at 2:24 P.M.”

We continue methodically for over an hour, tuning out the updates from the field when the plane is fully evacuated and cleanup of the firefighting foam has begun—it’s been linked to PFOS in groundwater, which is a battle we’ll have to fight another day. An alert comes in that Rhode Island Hospital is at capacity. Finally, we each scan our lists to make sure all 168 passengers and crew have been checked.

“I only have one sixty-seven,” Sue mutters. “Let me count again.” And then: “There’s a lap infant. Twenty-three months.”

“Who was the child with?” I ask.

“Elisabeth Abbott,” Sue answers. “Age twenty-nine.”

For a moment we are all lost in our silos, trying to find something—anything—about an infant. “Elisabeth got transported to Kent Hospital,” I announce.

Roger’s eyes are on his screen. “Youngest kid I’ve got is five.”

I dial Kent Hospital and the Emergency Department picks up. “Hi, this is Molly Fitzgerald from Emergency Preparedness and Response,” I say. “Do you have an Elisabeth Abbott registered?”

After a brief conversation, I turn back to Sue. “The patient is in open-heart surgery, but there’s no record of an infant coming in with her. And no unaccompanied toddler in the ED.”

My fingers start flying, texting in our Teams app. We’ve accounted for 167 of the 168. Missing person is a child, age 2. Can everyone please check for a 2-year-old child? One by one the responses trickle in: No minors.

No children.

Negative.

Hasbro Children’s Hospital, which is part of Rhode Island Hospital, responds with the name of a six-year-old patient—but with a different last name and two parents present.

My mind revs into overdrive. Is the toddler deceased and so small that the firemen sweeping the plane missed it? Was the toddler safely evacuated... and kidnapped? It seems ridiculous to even think it.

I turn to the airport fire chief. “Can you get eyes inside the plane?”

His radio crackles as he sends one of the firefighter EMTs onto the plane.

Here’s the most important thing I’ve learned about my job: You can’t stop a disaster from occurring, no matter how much you prepare. But if you cannot keep everyone safe, you can damn well make sure they are all accounted for.

The alternative—the not knowing—is untenable. I should know.

A burst of static bleeds through the radio. “Chief,” I hear, “we found the child.”

There’s more information relayed—the final passenger was tucked inside the cubby where the drinks cart is usually stowed. Through the windows of the EOC I can just make out a firefighter in full gear, standing in the open doorway of the plane. He holds an American Girl doll in his arms. The doll wears a neon T-shirt identifying it as a character in our extensive training drill, the same neon shirt worn by the 167 adult actors hired to play the parts of airline passengers in this simulation.

“This is the exercise director,’ I hear, over the radio. “We are calling End Ex. The exercise has ended at 5:57 p.m. Hot washes will begin at 6:30 P.M. in parking lot B.”

And... whew. The drill that has taken three years to plan has been successfully completed. All the adrenaline rushes out of me, leaving me shaky on the seat between Sue and Roger.

Rhode Island is a small state, so everyone in my field knows me. But when people meet me for the first time, they're always surprised that the head of the department is only twenty-five. As a kid I was a brainiac, skipped a grade, and graduated from Columbia with a combined B.S. and master’s in public health at nineteen. In college, worked summers at the R.I. Department of Health as a scholar, their fancy term for an intern, studying how much time we’d actually have to evacuate a nursing home that lost heat or air-conditioning. The summer after my junior year, I collected data that helped emergency managers locate residents who used electricity-dependent medical equipment. I graduated midyear and was officially working in the Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response by February 2020.

I bet you can see where this is going.

If not for Covid, my career might not have advanced so quickly. There wouldn't have been such burnout turnover, and by 2023, I would likely not have been made the acting deputy of the department, frantically getting a crash course in management. Maybe my boss would not have retired to the Keys last year. But three months ago, I officially became the permanent chief of the department, who—with a staff of thirteen—oversees the public health of all Rhode Islanders.

When I say I work in public health, most people nod, though they rarely know what that encompasses: All the things happening behind the scenes to keep you safe. Making sure you don’t have lead paint in your house. That your food and water are not going to make you sick. That it’s safe to swim at the beach. That if you’re in a car accident, the best technology keeps you from getting injured. And vaccines, of course, are another polarizing example. It’s all of these things and more: communications, lab and epidemiology preparedness, chronic disease prevention, acute disease management—all wrapped into one.

Preparedness is the crystal ball of public health. We’ve done enough training for that muscle memory to kick in on the day you need it. My business is held to an incredibly unfair standard—survival—because acceptable loss is an impossible concept. But public health isn’t what’s best for every person; it’s the greatest good for the greatest number. If you run out of ventilators during Covid, who gets one? The child with Down syndrome, or the sixty-five-year-old epidemiologist who might find a cure for the virus? It’s like the famous moral dilemma of the trolley problem over and over.

Luckily, we don’t do it alone, though it wasn’t always like this.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, there was less coordination and communication between agencies. Back then, New Orleans had a more traditional emergency plan for if the levees were breached by a big storm: to commandeer the Superdome, use generators, bring in MREs from the military to feed people, set up cots. This would have worked if every resident of New Orleans was a healthy eighteen-year-old. Unfortunately, some were elderly, obese, and diabetic. The rations were full of sugar and salt—great for soldiers sweating in a desert, but less great for people susceptible to heart attacks and strokes and diabetic comas. They had a plan... for the wrong people. That’s where public health comes in. During an emergency, you need stuff, but you also need staff... people trained in exactly these issues.

That’s who'll participate in our hot wash today. It’s a debrief on how the exercise went. Miguel, my exercise coordinator, will run the session with an airport administrator. The mood is jovial but tired, the mental and physical ache of a job well done.

When we're all assembled, I’m surrounded by EMTs, fire department chiefs, state police, Rhode Island Airport Corporation reps, Southwest Airlines officials, and colleagues from the Emergency Management Agency. Only one of my staff, Katani, is absent, and that’s because she is making sure the crisis actors get all their makeup off. Those fake shards of glass we use for moulage are expensive—props that we will reuse in a future exercise. You also don’t want someone with a shard of glass sticking out of their back stopping at Cumby’s to fill up their gas tank and freaking everyone out.

Miguel starts off by thanking everyone. “All right,” he says, looking down at his clipboard. “Alerts and notifications. How did that go?” Communications is always the first thing to fail in an emergency. Sometimes it’s the devices themselves, and sometimes people don’t relay the right information. Did the Southwest crew tell the fake passengers what was happening, and how to safely exit the plane? Adrenaline causes tunnel vision, so first responders may have forgotten to communicate with hospitals. Then hospitals turn to social media for their info.

I find myself scribbling down notes in the hope we can learn and improve. “Molly,” Miguel says. “What happened with that kid?”

When I’m participating in the exercise, and not just planning it, Miguel likes to throw in a wrench to keep me on my toes. He knows that a person unaccounted for would activate all kinds of panic responses in me.

You see, I am one of more than three thousand kids who lost a parent in the attacks on 9/11.

I was less than three months old at the time, so I don’t have any real memories of my mom. I know what I’ve been told about her: she was going to a doctor's appointment in the South Tower when the plane struck. She was an artist whose favorite medium was mosaics. I have her blue eyes. Here’s what I don’t know: If she sang in the shower. If she had a guilty pleasure, like pork rinds or smutty novels or ABBA. If she was afraid of heights or spiders. If she liked the Mets or the Yankees. If she was a good cook or a reluctant one. All the details that would transform her, in my mind, from a martyr into a mother.

When I was a kid, I used to say I wanted to meet her. I knew it wasn't possible, and I knew I’d technically already met her, but that was the wish that I protected like a flame in a hurricane. It flickered every time I argued with my father or my stepmother, Evie; when I was sitting alone at a school lunch table; when I got accepted to Columbia. I wondered, the first time I broke curfew, if my mother would have been angry at me. If she would have liked the first boy I had a crush on. Evie says that when I was in preschool I used to repeat the stories she had told me about her and my mother’s friendship back in college (Remember the time my mom and I fell into the pond?) and she would smile and say, “I remember that, but I don’t think you were with us yet.”

Growing up, I was The Girl Who’d Lost Her Mom on 9/11. Every anniversary since I was old enough to understand, there has been media coverage of us, like we are a zoo exhibit. My entire life has been scrutinized and pitied, although I never asked for it.

In every photo of my mother, she wears her long hair in a French braid, and woven through that braid is a red ribbon. My father said it was so that he could always spot her in a crowd. It wasn’t until I got older and interested in emergency preparedness that I realized how prophetic my mother had been. In the case of a catastrophe, any marker helps with identification.

Although I suppose it didn’t help on 9/11.

I clear my throat. “What happened with the child,” I tell Miguel, “is exactly what was supposed to. We were able to identify the hundred and sixty-eighth passenger, to get the fire department back on the plane for a final check, and ultimately to find the baby.”

“Well done,” Miguel says, and he moves on.

Eventually the hot wash wraps up. As people file out, Miguel comes to stand in front of me. “That went about as well as it could have, given the winds,” he says.

“For sure,” I agree. “When did that forecast change?” He shrugs. “We plan, God laughs.”

I grin. “Great job today. Go home. Kiss your husband. Have a beer.”

I put my computer into its backpack and pull on my jacket, only to turn around and nearly crash into the tall man standing in front of me. His glittering police badge is clipped onto his belt. “Chief,” he says formally.

“Detective Sergeant,” I reply. “Did your department get what it needed today?”

“Not entirely,” he says.

“I see. Is there anything I can do to help with that?”

He frowns as he considers this, and then he kisses me. “Much better,” he says.

Jesse Fitzgerald is a detective with the Providence Police Department, the city’s polygraphy expert... and my husband. I wrap my arms around him and curl my fingers into his sunburst hair—all the yellows and golds of late summer. “It’s so hot when you talk Emergency Prep,” he says.

I laugh. “Epidemiology,” I whisper, sultry. “Anthrax.” Then I draw back just enough to look Jesse in the eye. “Wait. Did the Warwick PD really not get what it needed today from the exercise?” He'd been called in as an impartial evaluator for them.

His arms lock around my waist. “The Warwick PD is satisfied,” Jesse promises.

“In that case,” I say, looking up at him through my lashes, “hazmat decon.”

Jesse smirks. “Keep it up and I won’t be held responsible for what I do.”

“I think this airport's seen enough action today,” I say, slipping my hand into his. “Let’s go home.”

If there’s anyone who understands what it was like growing up with a personal tragedy in the public eye, it’s Jesse. When he was a teenager, his thirteen-year-old sister, Anna, sued their parents for medical emancipation, after she was asked to donate a kidney to their other sister, Kate. Kate had leukemia, and Anna had been born as a savior sibling, donating blood and platelets and everything else her sister needed to stay alive—until she fought back with a lawsuit that nearly ripped their family apart. Amazingly, Anna won. She wound up donating a kidney to Kate—but not the way anyone had hoped. After getting into a car accident just minutes after the judge's verdict, Anna was declared brain dead, and her organs donated.

Rhode Island is a small community, and Brian Fitzgerald—Jesse’s dad—had been a career firefighter. Their story was famous, so I had learned about Jesse’s family long before I’d ever met him.

But when I did, I didn’t have to explain to Jesse how the absence of a person can be larger than the presence of others in your life; how grief recedes but loss is exponential; how there’s always a tickle in the back of your mind, like a melody whose notes you've forgotten.

How you can be doing the most innocuous thing, like watching a little girl and her mother getting matching glittery pink manicures, and realize that you are crying. Or how, during a run, a stitch in your chest might double you over not because you are out of breath but because you are alive, and someone else is not.

Jesse and I reacted in polar opposite ways to our tragic childhoods. I became an island, surrounding myself with books instead of friends and getting straight As and perfect SAT scores, determined to not add to the shadows in my father’s eyes. Jesse, on the other hand, became an utter delinquent, desperate for the attention of parents distracted by his siblings’ drama, as subtle as a five-alarm blaze. He drank, got high, shoplifted, and lit fires that he then watched firefighters (including his own father) put out.

Growing up with the notoriety of being that poor girl, I gravitated toward a career that clearly is a psychological defense mechanism for the emotional fallout I’ve dodged for twenty-five years. After 9/11, my father fell headfirst into a black hole of conspiracy theories. In spite of his intelligence—he is a forensic engineer, an expert witness who travels all over the country to testify in lawsuits about structural damage claims—he became obsessed with the idea that the U.S. government was behind the attacks on the Twin Towers. Since I am a public servant—and also, well, rational—it is a topic we studiously avoid.

Thank God I have Evie. My stepmother had been my biological mother’s best friend, and after the attacks, she was the glue that held my father together and took care of me. When I was a toddler and started asking about the strange woman in pictures in our house, sending my father into a new spiral of grief, Evie took all the memories of my mother—photos, artwork she had done, jewelry she owned—and carefully packed them away so that we wouldn't have to rip a wound open every day. I learned years later that she and my father argued over this, that it nearly killed her to erase my mother from her own home, but that it was the only way she felt like she could protect us from hurting even more. Over the years, she’s made an art out of that.

I can’t imagine a time when Evie wasn’t in my life, and maybe my father couldn't, either, which is why they eventually married. Evie always knew what I needed before I had figured it out: a shoulder to cry on, a day of playing hooky with her, a Magnum bar in the freezer after a grueling biology midterm. She was smart and cool and funny, the mother my friends wished they'd had. If anything, I felt guilty for sensing the hole left behind by my biological mother, since I had a surrogate one who'd filled it completely.

Jesse’s father became an alcoholic after Anna died, although he’s been sober now for over a decade. Jesse’s mom, Sara, in an effort to stop smothering her surviving daughter with attention, started working part-time for the lawyer who'd represented Anna in her trial. Jesse also completely reinvented himself. He quit drinking, and I’ve never even seen him take a Tylenol. He graduated from the police academy and worked his way up to detective. By the time I met him in 2020, he was working with the Providence fire chief on arson cases and fully trained as an expert in lie detection. It takes one to know one, he says.

But the person who's changed the most, of course, is his sister Kate. She runs a dance studio in Upper Darby, where Jesse grew up. I’ve watched her at the barre, teaching students, and I’m always amazed by how someone whose body betrayed them could be in such control of every muscle and limb. She’s married to Gary, a URI professor. They have an eight-year-old daughter named Anna.

Jesse opens the door to our condo and tosses his keys on the side table. I dump my backpack on the couch, pulling out my work phone and making sure the volume is turned up. Just because we completed a massive FAA-directed exercise today doesn’t mean there won’t be a real emergency tonight.

I feel the heat of Jesse’s body as he comes up behind me, pulling the elastic from my braid and unraveling the strands, then wrapping the red ribbon around his wrist like a kabbalah string. He pulls my hair to one side and kisses my neck. “Go shower off that flop sweat.”

I turn, indignant. “I didn’t flop sweat!”

He laughs. “Then I’ll shower off my flop sweat and you make dinner.”

“On the other hand, my hair still smells like smoke.” Jesse is a far better chef than I am; he’s spent enough time with the fire department, taking shifts cooking for everyone on call. In the bathroom, I peel out of my jeans and shirt and turn on the faucet in our shower. Immediately, I am shot with a spray of water in my face. “Dammit,” I mutter. There’s been something wrong with the showerhead for a while now—either zero pressure or, like tonight, a stream like a charged fire hose—but neither of us has had time to address it.

By the time I put on Jesse’s faded Bruins sweatshirt that’s probably as old as I am and a pair of leggings, brush through my wet hair and rebraid it with another red ribbon, the table is already set with two steaming plates of pesto pasta, a glass of red for me, a ginger ale for him.

He’s washing out the pots he used—is there anything in the English language sexier than that sentence?—and I stealthily watch him. The muscles of his back shift under the soft fabric of his Providence PD tee and he’s humming as he scrubs. Suddenly he turns around, his eyes as blue as the heart of a flame. “Busted,” he says, his lips twitching.

“Stop being such a cop,” I joke.

“Stop being such a perv.”

You wouldn’t know that Jesse’s about to turn forty unless you looked closely at those eyes and marked the faint lines at the corners. The age difference worried me a little when we first started dating. But then he just gradually became a habit until any concern faded away. I’d go to the office and find him waiting there with coffee milk, because he knew I liked it. I’d go for a run in Roger Williams Park and bump into him. I’d drive to the grocery store only to have him pull into the parking spot beside me. Maybe it was fate, maybe it was just that Rhode Island is a small state—but Jesse became part of my routine so seamlessly that by the time I noticed, I didn’t want to recall what my days had looked like before he was embroidered onto them.

I ate my pasta like I always do—shoveling food into my mouth as if eating is a contest, or as if I’m worried I’ll be called in to the office before I finish. Jesse frowns. “One day you’re gonna choke.”

“How fortunate,” I say around a forkful of rotini, “that I am married to someone who is trained in first aid. Also, this is delicious and thank you and I love you.”

Jesse was married once before, when he was around my age. He got divorced when his wife ran off with her female Pilates instructor. They run a wellness retreat in the Maine woods now. He swore off relationships until he met me, despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold. He was ready to commit long before I was. “Not till I’m twenty-seven,” I’d told him. “My prefrontal cortex is still growing and I’m more likely to make a mistake.”

“You’re not going to make a mistake just because you’re young,” Jesse had argued. “When you know, you know.”

“Like you did?”

That shut him up for a little while, and he agreed to move in together without a solid plan for the future—something that, given my job, was truly ironic. He promised he’d wait for my brain to mature. He swore that I would never have to change his diaper or wipe his drool when he was elderly. But then one night he came home from work after running a polygraph on the primary suspect for an arson case. It was an unhoused guy with mental illness who had started a fire that killed two victims—a couple that had just signed the paperwork with the bank to own the house.

Jesse had been uncharacteristically quiet when he got home. He sat on the couch, a storm behind his features. We both had careers where, every now and then, we saw something we would never be able to unsee. I’d taken his hand. “Wanna talk about it?”

His jaw worked before he was able to push out a word. “Newlyweds,” he said. “The couple that died? They thought this was the beginning of their lives, not the end.” He turned his fierce gaze to me. “I don’t want to wait, Molly. I don’t know how many days I have left.”

I swallowed, seeing it all: the ghost of death that had roared like a lion today, the unwavering compass of his commitment to me, the vulnerability of loving someone—which also opens you up to the gutting potential of losing them. “See? I told you you’re old,” I choked out, a bad attempt at a joke when what I meant was Yes.

That night, when Jesse and I made love, I admitted that my hesitation had never been about him. It was the wedding I didn’t want. I didn’t want the happiest day of my life compromised by the idea that my biological mother wasn't there to see it. I didn’t want a weird candle to be lit for her, and I didn’t want any guest bringing up her name and inadvertently hurting Evie, as if she wasn’t the real mother of the bride. “T can fix that,” Jesse said, and the next morning we went to the courthouse. We didn’t tell our families until a month later, when we were all together on the Fourth of July at India Point Park for the fireworks, and a fireman who used to work with Jesse’s dad came over to say hello and asked Jesse how married life was treating him. Evie had been devastated, but my father had just grinned. “Your mom and I got married in secret, too,” he said.

Now, Jesse leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “I could go with you to New York,” he says.

Tomorrow—Friday—I am taking a personal day I take every year, to go to New York City for the annual commemoration ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial. It’s a four-hour drive; and I’ll leave at 3:00 a.m. to make sure I’m there in time.

Jesse doesn’t like the thought of me doing a round trip to the city by myself, or being at the mercy of the hoopla that is sure to surround the twenty-fifth anniversary of the event. I shake my head. “Thanks, but I’m good.” He understands. It’s the same reason that he goes out the night of his dead sister’s birthday, holding some private vigil for Anna that keeps him away from home till nearly dawn, then crawls into bed and grabs onto me as if I am a life preserver in a shipwreck.

“Besides,” I say, “don’t you have to run a polygraph tomorrow?”

“Yeah. The bank teller embezzlement case. But I could reschedule.”

I stand to gather the plates. “No need. By the way, the shower’s still wonky,” I tell him.

“It’s on my list,” Jesse promises. He gently catches my wrist. “Hey,” he says softly. “You know the deal. You get to take care of everyone else, and I get to take care of you.”

With one tug, he pulls me onto his lap. “I love you,” I whisper, kissing my way to the freckle on his ear that looks like a piercing and—amazingly, given his wild child past—is not. “But you smell like flop sweat.” Then I bite down on his lobe.

He yanks away from me, but he’s laughing. I hop off his lap and instead of stacking the dishes, I frame his jaw with my palms. I stamp my smile against his, hoping I can convey all the words I don’t know how to say—the gratitude and the good fortune and the tenderness of knowing that even though I could survive on my own, I am so happy that I do not have to.

Jesse and I have a ritual before we fall asleep: each of us confesses one of our worst fears and we decide whose is the most devastating.

Tonight, Jesse is pressed up against my back, his arm banded tight around my waist. “Worst-case scenario,” he whispers. “Flesh-eating bacteria.”

That is a good one. Necrotizing fasciitis is truly vile. “Spread by mosquitoes,” Jesse qualifies.

I shudder, having flashbacks of Zika. The Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry Zika had been geographically contained before they suddenly showed up in Connecticut. With global warming, insectborne diseases have become more of a threat. It’s why a dengue outbreak in Brazil is something I have to pay attention to also, and why climate change affects public health.

His fingers drum on my stomach, a prompt. “Electromagnetic pulse,” I offer.

I hear Jesse’s soft huff of laughter in my hair. “Say more.”

I turn so that we are facing each other. In the dark, I can barely make out the curve of his jaw. “It takes out everything that uses a battery, and all big governments have the ability to throw one at each other. Just think about it—every device you own becomes a paperweight. No refrigeration, no computers, no electronic communications. How do you get news, or send it? How do you travel, or store food, or get water? There would be blackouts. Hospitals couldn’t function. Emergency services would be crippled.”

Jesse rolls onto his back. “Jesus,” he says. “I win,” I tell him.

He strokes my hair. “Pretty sure I did,” he murmurs, and I know he’s not talking about our game. His voice is striped with the wonder that he sometimes expresses about how many millions of choices and moments had to fall into exactly the right order for the two of us to ever have met.

I roll on top of him. “I can think of something to do during an electromagnetic pulse blackout,” I murmur. I’m only a breath away from him when my phone rings on the nightstand. Immediately I answer. It’s Toby, who’s on call tonight. “Hey,” I say, answering. “What have you got?”

“Five-car pileup with mass casualties on I-95,” he says. I wait, as this alone would not typically merit a call. He continues, “One of which is an oil tanker on its side and leaking.”

“Okay,” I reply, already mentally running through how to get more ambulances to the scene, figure out cleanup for a potential oil spill, and put hospitals on alert. I switch Toby to speaker and start braiding my hair into submission.

Jesse is already padding into the kitchen. “Coffee's on,” he says.

When I was growing up, my family received an invitation every year to the 9/11 anniversary commemorations, but we had never gone.

They got my father too riled up with his conspiracy theories, and Evie said it made her too sad to think about how her best friend had died. So it wasn’t until I was sixteen and a freshman at Columbia that I attended. And I went alone.

The ceremony had started at 8:30 A.M. on the Memorial Plaza. It was already packed when I arrived, because somehow I had missed the memo that families would be allowed access an hour before. I showed my invitation letter for entry as I watched crowds spill across the plaza—many people holding posters or laminated photos or ID tags of the person they'd lost. There were people wearing American flag trucker hats and NEVER FORGET tees. Others wore suits and ties, squeezing in the memorial before work. Almost everyone held up a cellphone to film the tribute.

As I passed the memorial pools, I noticed that people had stuck flowers and notes and a global rainbow of flags into the carved names of the dead. I’d managed to find a spot close to the area where the news cameras were corralled just as the honor guard carrying the flag began their march. Spit-polished NYPD and FDNY and Port Authority officials held it stretched between them, trailed by a corps of drummers and bagpipers who provided a solemn beat. They had walked past lines of military, all saluting, and the dignitaries—the president and vice president, the mayor, the governor. A flag was turned to face the crowd as a girl sang the National Anthem and then was marched off with ceremony as Emerald Society and Port Authority pipers played.

Beside the podium in the front was a bell, which was rung at 8:46 A.M., the moment that the first tower was hit, and which would be rung again to commemorate the moment that the second tower was struck, and the times of the attacks on the Pentagon and Flight 93. In between, family members stepped up in twos, reading the names of those who had died on 9/11. It would take over four hours to recite them all.

Most of the names were simply stated, but sometimes when a reader reached their own loved one, they added some personal details: He was my cousin, and he was known as Mr. Ladder 24 at Engine 1 on West 31st Street. He was last heard from on the 44th floor of the South Tower. And: I wear my father’s initials over my heart, so every day I remind myself of the impact he had on my life. God bless the military and first responders; the FDNY, the NYPD, and the United States of America...

My own mother’s name had been Eloise Ambrose, and because of that, she was in the first batch to be read.

I found myself leaning forward. The names kept coming, like the flow of a river. And then, I heard hers. The melody of syllables, swiftly followed by someone else’s name. I wanted to tell them to stop. To tell everyone that Eloise Ambrose wasn’t just one of 2,977 gone, indistinguishable from the rest. That she was my mother, and worth knowing for the attributes that made her her.

Except I did not know firsthand what those things were.

Suddenly I was crying so hard I could not catch my breath. I had to put my hand on the railing around the press box just to stay upright.

The blinking black eye of a television camera swiveled to capture me, caught in a web of grief. Stop, I said, or I wanted to, and I put out my hand to shield myself.

By then, others around me were turning at the disruption. I tried to back away from the crowd, but it was too thick around me. “Hey,” a voice said. “Asshole.” A skinny brown girl with pink hair, ripped tights, and combat boots leaped onto the railing that cordoned off the press. “Leave her alone.”

In response, the camera zoomed in closer.

“Don't say I didn’t warn you,” the girl said, and she grabbed a fistful of the cameraman’s shirt and punched him square in the face.

He howled as blood streamed down his chin. “You little shit,” he cried.

“Bite me,” the girl tossed back, slinging her arm around my shoulders. “Let’s blow this place.”

Through my tears, I said, “That’s a really bad choice of metaphor today.”

Tabs grinned at me, and we've been friends ever since.

Given the oil truck accident (one death, ten injuries, no decon needed), I only get two hours of sleep before leaving for New York City. I scarf down a Kind bar when I realize the gnawing inside me is not stress but actual hunger, and then I blow cold air-conditioning onto my face to keep me wide awake. By the time I reach the coffee shop where Tabs and id="" always meet up on this anniversary, it’s already 7:45 A.M. Tabs is checking her watch. She wears oversize glasses and men’s trousers, tied at the waist with a bandanna. Her T-shirt reads: No REGERTS. “Finally,” she shrieks, wrapping me up in an embrace. “You’re late. And don’t give me a lame excuse like you were saving lives in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”

I hug her back. “They changed the legal name in 2020.”

“And to think it only took 384 years for that teensy little state to notice its big racist energy.”

Since nine years ago, when she decked the cameraman, Tabs and I have bonded from the shared anguish of losing a parent on 9/11. Her father, Francisco Cubero, had worked as a security guard for Summit Security Services in the South Tower. As she said to me when she dragged me to a bar that day (one which wouldn't card me), the problem with those anniversary ceremonies is that they're public events for very private grief. If your father dies in a car accident, it’s terrible, but your pain belongs to you. If your dad died on 9/11, your pain is subject matter that the people watching coverage on TV feel like they have a right to witness, because the attacks were a global event. “The news networks,” Tabs had said that day, as she ate martini olives and maraschino cherries right out of a little plastic box on the bar, “make it a spectator sport. Hollywood's been blowing up buildings for years with CGI, and we watch it on screens as entertainment. People at home don’t differentiate between that and footage from the terrorist attacks. But you and me, we’re not actors.

We're not playing characters who lost a parent. We don’t get to change the channel.”

Tabs is eight years older than me. Like my mother, her dad’s remains were never found. They are two of the thousands for whom there are still no bone fragments, no burned ID cards, no DNA. Unlike me, Tabs has actual memories of her father. Once, when it was snowing hard, he took me down Madison Avenue in a toddler sled. He fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and it sounds weird, but I’ll never make them any other way. He used to make shadow animals with his hands while I was eating breakfast. She’s told me these so often that she’s begun to repeat herself, but I never call her on it. How could I, when I’m jealous?

This year, as Tabs pulls me toward Ground Zero, I feel a rush of gratitude for her company. We are part of a club no one wants to join, and apparently, it’s a lifetime membership you can never cancel. “Today’s going to be an utter zoo,” she says as we power walk. “How’s Jesse? How’s the job? Tell me all the things.”

“Jesse's fine,” I tell her.

“I know he’s fine.” Tabs smirks. “I’ve seen the man. How’s he doing?”

I roll my eyes. “He’s busy. All public services are kind of a mess. Let’s just say we're doing a lot of creative budgeting now that the federal government’s decided Emergency Preparedness and Public Health are luxury items instead of essentials.”

She pauses. “For real? Can you say measles?” “No, actually, we can’t. We have a gag order on us, too.”

The memorial is closed to everyone but the families of the dead this morning. We walk toward the reflecting pools, surrounded by bronze panels etched with the names of the dead. There are little American flags stuck into the grooves of the letters. Photographs of babies and married couples, taped to chopsticks and wedged in the divots of a G or sa P. The stem of a rose. A red bandanna on the name of Welles Crowther, who made three trips from the South Tower’s sky lobby down stairwells, leading terrified people to safety. Aviator pins, peanut butter cups, messages with cramped writing, a seashell. Ballet slippers. A lei. Prayer cards. Someone has left a glove with a quartz heart in its palm. This is the only ceremony many families have for their loved ones, the only headstone to decorate.

Every night maintenance teams sweep the panels for these relics. They get rid of perishables—food, flora, fifths of Jack Daniel’s—and they save the rest. These are entered into an electronic database by size and date. Most bits and pieces of memory get tucked away in storehouses in Jersey City and upstate New York. A few are selected by curators of the museum and become part of the collection.

Okay, yes, I went down a rabbit hole once, trying to find out what happened to all the things that were left behind at the memorial. A name is just a name. But when you see a note that says, Jim, she is all grown up now, you would be proud, it makes you stop and wonder. Who raised this girl? Who was she to Jim? It makes him real. It makes him flicker, like a pilot light, in a world he no longer inhabits.

Tabs moves away, looking for the panel with her father’s name. I do the same for my mother.

CESAR AMORANTO ALVIAR. TARIQ AMANULLAH. ANGELO AMARANTO. JAMES M. AMATO, JOSEPH AMATUCCIO, ELOISE AMBROSE.

I reach up and unravel my braid. When my hair is loose and whipping around my face, I take the red ribbon I’ve woven through it and press it just beneath my mother’s etched name, underlining. She was here. She was mine. It won’t stick, which is why other notes and photos and memorabilia are secured with little rocks or tape—neither of which I have. I rummage in my backpack for loose change and use coins to wedge the ribbon into the horizontal dash of the E, the A, the e. By the time I’m done, Tabs is back, her own eyelashes damp.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11 straddles the line between respectful solemnity and justifiable circus. The dignitaries are back, but there are more of them—every living president, leaders from other countries, Zohran Mamdani and Kathy Hochul, plus every NYC mayor and governor since Giuliani and Pataki. The Blue Angels fly overhead, leaving seams in the sky. But the same devoted families and friends are here, clutching their framed portraits and frayed posters.

When my mother’s name is read, ‘Tabs squeezes my hand. When her father’s name is read, I lean my head on her shoulder.

I try to pay attention to the litany of others, but I find my mind drifting, thinking about the pictures I have seen and the footage I have watched. I was alive that day, unlike some in the crowd, but I was blessedly too young to remember anything. I close my eyes and imagine a sky so blue that it burned. I try to imagine what I would have done, as a scholar of emergency preparedness, to minimize the casualties and mitigate the disaster.

I can tell you anything you want to know about homemade explosives. I know not to use a walkie-talkie or phone near any suspected device, because cellular and radio signals are sometimes used for detonation. I have the State Bomb Squad and K-9 explosive detection on speed dial. Not a single one of these things would have helped on 9/11. Because until that morning, nobody had ever considered using a plane itself as a bomb.

Finally, the last name, Igor Zukelman, is read. When there’s nothing left but silence, two trumpeters lift their instruments. They play Taps in a call-and-response that sounds like a conversation, until a solo note hangs in the air, like the smoke and dust and shock that hazed the city for weeks.

Tabs and I walk past the Scylla and Charybdis of two press pools, stuffed with cameras and reporters. “Fuckers,” she mutters as she turns away to wipe her cheeks. When we reach the gorgeous new PATH station, we stop to say goodbye. Tabs will take the subway home.

It’s always like this for us. Although there’s no one else I want to be here with, the bond I have with Tabs is situational. After the ceremony, we each want to be left alone to our thoughts.

“Next year,” Tabs says, hugging me close, “Aruba.” “Hawaii,” I suggest.

Every year since we've been coming, we promise each other that next year we will privately celebrate our parents with daiquiris on a beach.

And then every year, we still come back to Ground Zero.

One of my favorite emergency preparedness stories happened on the day my mother died. Rick Rescorla was a Vietnam vet and the head of security for Morgan Stanley. The bank had nearly three thousand employees and was the largest tenant of the South Tower, from level 50 to level 72. Every month, like clockwork, Rick forced everyone in the company to do a fire drill. While finance bros were buried in their cubicles making deals that would net them hundreds of thousands of dollars, Rick would go around with his megaphone shouting at them to walk down all those flights of stairs to the lobby. Suffice it to say that most employees hated this.

On September 11, when the first plane hit the North Tower, at 8:46 a.M., Port Authority sent word to the people in the South Tower to remain in place. Rick, however, said Hell no. He picked up that megaphone and started herding Morgan Stanley employees down the stairwells. At 9:03 a.m., when the second plane struck that tower, the impact knocked people down and sent office furniture flying. The power cut out. In the stairwells, those who were fleeing fell and were injured.

So Rick did what he had done in Vietnam, when he wanted his soldiers to keep marching—he sang old Welsh songs he remembered from his childhood. At one point, between songs, he called his wife.

She later reported what he'd told her: Stop crying. I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.

By 9:45, most of Morgan Stanley had been safely evacuated. But because a handful of people were unaccounted for, Rick turned around and walked back into the South Tower. Thirteen Morgan Stanley employees, including Rick and four of his security staff—died when the building collapsed at 9:59, but 2,687 employees and 250 visitors to the bank lived, because Rick Rescorla had a plan.

I wonder if there was someone trying to help my mother on that day.

By the time I get back to Providence, the sun is setting. Inside our condo, the lights are off, and a line of mismatched candles forms a trail that wraps around the corner of the hallway. Smiling faintly, I follow the path past our kitchen table, through the bedroom, and into the bathroom, where Jesse sits on the edge of the tub. Steam rises above the bath bubbles. Five more candles stand on the windowsill.

“Candles are a fire hazard,” I murmur.

“Oh, damn,” Jesse teases. “I forgot the accelerant.” He folds me into a tight embrace. “How'd it go?”

“Fine.” I shrug, and he raises a brow.

“It was fine,” I repeat. “Just like last year, but with more hoopla.” He ignores me, unbuttoning my cardigan and peeling it away.

Sometimes it really sucks to have a husband whose job it is to spot liars.

It’s not looking away or biting your lip that gives you away, he told me once. It’s if the suspect does that when he hasn't done it any other time. It’s longer hesitations between the question and the answer. It’s dropping the words me, my, I—which you do because lying is actually hard on your brain.

On the other hand, he had added, you can only spot a liar who seems stressed. If someone's told themselves a story so often that they've begun to believe it, they can turn around and tell it to you as if it were the truth.

Jesse shucks off my shoes and my pants and finally my underwear. A groan escapes me when I sink into the water, loosening muscles that I hadn’t even realized were so tense. “Can you bring me my work phone?”

Jesse shakes his head. “You still have the rest of today off.” “But—” “Mol,” he says, “Rhode Island will still be standing tomorrow morning. And if it’s not, you get to say I told you so. See? Win-win.”

He bends to kiss me, and I cup his face in my hands, giving him a beard made of bubbles. “You look like Santa.”

Jesse grins. “Then it’s good you have a thing for old guys.” He edges out of the bathroom, leaving me to relax.

For a while I stare at the candle flames as they dance and weave. Then I look out the window, where stars are just starting to wink into existence.

At that first memorial, the time when I met Tabs, after we left the bar, we wandered around Lower Manhattan for hours. When it was finally dark, the Tribute in Light soared into the night, two towers illuminated like phantoms of the buildings that had once stood there.

“That one’s for your mom,” Tabs said, pointing. “And that one’s for my dad.”

In New York City, those beams will scrape the heavens tonight. But here, it’s the same view I had last night, of the stars littering the sky.

It was Jesse’s father, Brian, who taught me to find the constellations, to navigate by their position. It was Brian who reminded me a star is just a fire that can’t be extinguished.

That night, even with Jesse’s arms around me, I fight sleep. “Worst-case scenario,” I whisper. “Finding the missing smallpox sample.”

I can feel him swim back to consciousness. “It’s lost?”

“After the disease was wiped out, there were only two samples left in the whole world,” I tell him. “One at the CDC, the other at a similar lab in Russia. But when the USSR fell, so did the building the lab was in. No one knows where that sample went if it’s buried underground or in someone’s pocket just waiting to become a bioweapon.”

Jesse hums against my throat. “Okay. My worst-case scenario: L.A. wildfires,” he counters. “Like the ones in 2025, but with the Santa Ana winds and the mountain wave.”

“What's that?”

“Winds that get compressed when they hit the mountain range and start acting like tornadoes spinning a hundred miles per hour. They can send sparks over your head to start a fire behind you. Or travel a mile in less than a minute. A perfect storm of disasters.”

I pull his arms tighter around me. “But not tonight,” I murmur. “Not tonight,” he agrees.

I fell for Jesse slowly, gradually. For one thing, we met during Covid, and I was working 24/7 in the midst of the biggest public health emergency of my lifetime.

He might have had the most striking eyes I’d ever seen and a smile that felt like a power source, but the entire world was in a tailspin and I didn’t have the time or energy to invest in dating when I was so busy trying to keep everyone in the state alive.

So when he brought me Chinese takeout at the end of a very long, very fraught vaccine clinic, I told him that although I was flattered, I wasn’t interested in anything more than friendship.

Jesse scrutinized my face, then shook his head. “You’re lying,” he said.

“Um, I don’t think so.”

“I do,” he told me, “and I can prove it to you.” He asked for one chance to do just that, and when I rolled my eyes and agreed, he patiently waited until a time when there was enough of a lull in the pandemic response for us to find time to get together. Then he asked me to meet him for our date... at the police station.

During Covid, the Providence police station was far less busy than it had been before. Jesse met me in the lobby and led me through a rabbit warren to a small interrogation room, where we took off our masks. On the table in the room, there were deli sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, and bottles of Coke. There was also a polygraph machine—a small black box with wires snaking out of one side, that fed into a computer on the other.

He gestured to a seat with a small pad on it.

“Is this all because I said I don’t want to go out with you?” I asked.

Jesse leaned against the table across from me. “You know polygraphs don’t really detect lies?” he said, which was not an answer. “They detect emotional responses that you’re trying to hide. My job is to interview you in a way that reveals them.”

I raised a brow. “And that works?”

“Ninety-two percent of the time.”

“So some people can still get away with a lie?” I said. “That’s why it’s not admissible in court.”

Jesse rolled his eyes. “Yeah, so instead the judge instructs the jury to consider how direct a witness was in answering questions, and whatever else gives them a gut feeling of truth. But witnesses are coached on how to look sympathetic, and the average juror can detect a liar accurately only about half the time. Why do you think so many convictions are overturned with DNA evidence?”

Then he picked up a springy black tube connected to the polygraph device. “May I?” he asked.

When I nodded, he gently slipped the tube around me, his fingers grazing my collarbones. I swallowed. “So you’re admitting this isn’t a science," I said.

“On the contrary,” Jesse replied, settling a second black tube just below the band of my bra. “When you lie, you relive the event. The fear of getting caught in the lie triggers the autonomic nervous system. You’re familiar with fight, flight, or freeze?”

I was intimately familiar with it, because my body was exactly in that space right now.

“That’s the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, trying to protect the body.” His hands slipped to the edge of my sweater, tugging it down so that the tubes around me sat as flush as possible. “The parasympathetic part, on the other hand, is what brings your body back to its resting state. For example, if you watch a horror movie and scream at a scary part, and then you calm down again? That’s what the polygraph measures. You can’t control those responses, even if you try.”

He gestured to the bands he’d wrapped around me. “Those tubes measure breathing rate.” Then he took a stainless steel plate and velcroed it to my pointer finger, then secured a second plate on my ring finger. “These measure skin sensitivity—the more you lie, the more you sweat, which means sodium ions come out of your pores and trigger the electric response.” Finally, he affixed a blood pressure cuff around my bicep and a pulse oximeter on my finger. “And this measures your heart rate and pulse.”

Traitorously, my heart took that moment to thump hard against my ribs.

I was here voluntarily, and I had nothing to hide—and yet there was something so intimate about knowing that Jesse would be able to tell if I wasn’t being honest with him.

He handed me a piece of paper. “Write down a number between two and six. Don’t tell me what it is.” Abruptly, he moved away, all business, and sat down across the table. “All right, time to begin. This is the only time I’m going to ask you to lie to me during this interview.”

“Interview,” I repeated, scoffing.

“Date?” he suggested.

I frowned.

“You okay?” Jesse asked, looking at his screen. “Your pulse is a little... fast.”

He tried, and failed, to smother a grin. “White coat syndrome,” I said, lifting my chin. “You can’t hook me up to a monitor and not expect me to get nervous.”

“Nervousness is normal. I’m just learning your baseline.” Jesse glanced at me over the edge of the laptop. “We're going to start the acquaintance test now.”

“We're already acquaintances.”

He smiled. “That’s what we call the pretest for a polygraph—it’s meant to measure your response levels. Please keep your eyes fixed straight ahead and stay still. Remember what I said: this is the only time I’m going to ask you to lie to me during this interview. Understand?”

I nodded.

“No nodding—please verbalize your answers,” Jesse said. “Is your number two?”

I stared at the wall opposite. “No.”

“Is your number three?”

Evenly, I said, “No.”

“Is your number four?”

“No.”

And so on, until Jesse told me that the test was finished. “Well,” he said, “the number you picked is three.”

“Nice magic trick,” I said, slipping the note out from under my hand and showing it to him.

“Magic?” He pivoted his screen so that I could see the dancing lines for my breathing, my pulse, my sweat glands—and where they shot up off the chart. “See how that line inches up just before I asked you if your number was three... and then how it skyrocketed?”

I shrugged, trying to act unimpressed.

He grinned widely. “So you want a legit polygraph. The kind I’d do if you came in here to prove your innocence?”

Tilting my chin up, I met his gaze. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“That’s what they all say,” Jesse joked. “But sure.” He folded his arms. “There are four kinds of questions I ask during a polygraph. Neutral questions are completely unrelated to the reason we're here, and they're just to establish a baseline of physiological response. Sacrifice questions are about whether you trust me, or if I can trust you. Comparison questions are about things most people consider to be morally wrong, and they're meant to make even an innocent person anxious. And then relevant questions are the ones that relate to the crime.”

“Pretty sure I didn’t commit a crime,” I huffed out.

“Pretty sure refusing to give a relationship with me a chance before it even gets started is criminal,” Jesse murmured. He looked directly at me. “Are you wearing a red sweater?”

I looked down at my scarlet cardigan. “Yes.” “Are you single?”

“Yes,” I replied, narrowing my eyes.

“Do you trust me?”

I kept my eyes opposite, on the wall, but felt something soften inside me. I did trust Jesse, and I didn’t know why. “Yes.”

“Are you a natural blonde?”

My eyes flew to his. “Wouldn't you like to know.” “Actually,” Jesse said, “I would.”

“Yes, I am,” I ground out.

He laughed, and then I felt the heat of his gaze on me. “Have you ever lied to someone you consider a friend?”

I thought of Tabs, of how before the pandemic hit she had invited me to spend a weekend in the city just hanging out, and how I’d made up an excuse. I had just felt weird forging a bond with her outside of our shared tragedy.

“Yes,” I admitted.

Jesse moved behind me, his words falling onto the nape of my neck. “Are you attracted to me, Molly?”

I swallowed. “No,” I said.

His lips skated over my temple. “Do you dream about me at night, like I dream about you?”

Everything inside me liquefied. “No,” I whispered.

Jesse reached an arm around either side of me and flipped the laptop so that it was facing us. The screen showed lines in red, yellow, and green, snaking horizontally. At each of the questions, there was a small hill of response. For the last two, the spikes broke through the confines of the metric. “You know what I think?” Jesse knelt beside me and grasped my chin, running his thumb over my bottom lip. “I think half of what comes out of that gorgeous mouth is a lie.”

My heart started to race. On the screen, I watched the red line zoom high.

“But only half,” I said, and I kissed him.

When I was two years old, my father, my stepmother, Evie, and I moved to Barrington, Rhode Island. I guess being in New York City felt too much like being surrounded by ghosts, and they decided it was time to leave. They still live in the Victorian where I grew up, with its postage-stamp-size back lawn and stained glass door and the newel post that comes off in your hand if you turn the corner of the stairs too fast.

A couple days after my trip to New York, I stop by to meet Evie for lunch. I let myself in through the back door, which leads to the kitchen. My father sits at the kitchen table, holding an iPad, engrossed in his reading. When he sees me, he slides his glasses off. “Hey, you,” he says, a smile lighting his features gradually, the sun at dawn.

“Hey, you,” I reply. It’s our secret handshake, our standard greeting, our confirmation that everything is okay. He stands up and pulls me into an embrace so tight it’s hard for me to breathe.

I know why, and so does he, and neither of us will say it out loud. He is well aware that I went to the commemoration in the city. My dad still avoids Manhattan like it is the epicenter of a plague, and, really, who could blame him? He turns down every trial gig that requires a trip to New York City. Although most people assume it’s simply too hard for him to revisit the site where his wife was killed, it’s more than that. Like chatter on 4chan, when we get close to the anniversary, his obsession starts to peek out the way a slip does under the hem of a dress. He'll bury himself in podcasts and readings from conspiracy theorists, trying to connect threads that simply do not exist.

“I'm fine,” I tell him, looking him in the eye. “The ceremony was fine.”

He scoffs. “Of course it was. When you have something that big to cover up, you have to create a good distraction.” He nods down at his tablet. “NORAD was in on it, you know.”

I sigh. “Dad. It wasn’t till after 9/11 that a system was set up for the FAA to contact NORAD automatically. It’s true of most emergency management systems. It was tragic beyond belief, but it was also a learning experience.”

For a moment, the zeal in his eyes flickers. “God, you’re smart. Your mom would be so proud of you.”

“What would I be proud of?”

We both turn as Evie walks into the kitchen asking this question. My father and I exchange a glance—a silent agreement to not correct her. In our own ways, I think we have both been protecting Evie for years. My dad loves her and doesn’t want her to feel like a replacement for his first wife. Likewise, she has blanketed me with so much warmth and love. She soothed me when I fell on the playground, slept beside me during my nightmares, held my ponytail back from the toilet when I had the stomach bug. She was who I whispered the name of my first crush to, and she was the one who consoled me when he broke my fifth-grade heart by giving a pack of candy hearts to another girl. She taught me how to drive, how to do an eyeliner flick, and how to make pancakes. She proudly posts links to papers I co-author on her Facebook page, although most of the material is so esoteric it is practically unreadable to a layperson. She did everything to make me who I am today—except give birth to me. The least I can do is have the grace to not grieve the loss of my other mother in front of her.

I’ve only met one person who understood this complicated dance—a girl in my cohort in grad school who had been adopted. She’d secretly found her birth mother on 23andMe, but she didn’t want to contact the woman while her adoptive mother was still alive. How could I, she had said, when it might make my mom feel like she hasn't been good enough?

Evie gives me a hug and then slips an arm around my father’s waist. “Adam,” she says, “if you’re still talking about NORAD, I’m going full Lysistrata.”

He leans down and kisses her. “That’s not what you said last night...”

“Oh my God.” I cringe. “Act your age.”

“I’m fifty-one, not dead,” my father says, and then he turns to Evie. “Abject embarrassment of child: new parenting level unlocked.” He high-fives her.

I roll my eyes. “Goodbye,” I announce, as Evie laughs and falls into step beside me.

We leave my father waving at the door. “You want to walk? It’s beautiful out,” Evie says.

She’s right. This is my favorite time of year in Rhode Island. The trees are crowned in jewels—ruby and citrine, garnet and emerald, inset with gold. The ocean is a cobalt velvet cloak. It is not cold enough to need a coat, but the air is so crisp it stings the back of your throat. Fall in New England is an embarrassment of riches.

“Oh, wait a sec,” I say, grabbing the sixty-pound backpack I travel with whenever I leave home. In it I have two different MiFis—one that’s Verizon and one that’s FirstNet. I have a power pack the size of a newborn that I can plug everything into, in case electricity cuts out. I don’t have the satellite phone, but that’s only because I’m not the member of my team on call today. I haul the pack onto my shoulders.

Evie narrows her eyes. “That can’t be good for your back.”

“But it’s necessary for my mental health,” I say cheerfully. Not only is it literally my job to be prepared; but also, I have a superstitious streak: I’m sure the one time I leave my pack behind is when something will go terribly wrong.

Although Evie and I text all the time, we have a standing lunch date once a week. As we walk to the café, she fills me in on the reorganization of her department at work. For as long as I can remember, she’s been with Hasbro in Pawtucket in Girls Gaming (which was not, to my chagrin, RPGs about leveling up to a Supreme Court justice, or World of Warcraft—but rather than quests, players go to Taylor Swift concerts). Instead, her marketing team covers My Little Pony and Littlest Pet Shop, while Boys Gaming centers on Nerf guns. “My new supervisor is probably still playing Pretty Pretty Princess.” Evie sighs. “Straight out of Wharton, but she’s only twenty-eight.” She looks at me. “It is so weird getting old.”

“You’re not old,” I say. “Fifty is the new thirty.” “My knees have not gotten that memo.”

“Says the pickleball champion of Barrington.”

Evie’s face lights up. “Oh my God, did I tell you that your dad and I crushed the couple who live behind us and keep saying our willow tree is over their property line and they're going to sue to cut it down? Mother ate and left no crumbs.”

I burst out laughing. “Since when do you speak Gen Alpha?” “Since fifty is the new thirty,” Evie says, and we share a smile.

Evie was the one who had actually introduced my parents, during college. They'd all moved to New York together after graduation. The day my mother died, my father was flying in from a business trip in California and Evie was babysitting me. My mother never came home, and Evie never left. At first, she took care of me while my father trekked all over Manhattan putting up missing person flyers with my mother’s face on them. She made sure that he got fed and that he slept; she fielded calls from reporters; she met with detectives who were assigned to my mother’s disappearance. She organized the memorial for her, a month later. She made herself so integral to the functioning of our family that I am not surprised my father fell in love with her. How couldn't he? Evie would never be Eloise Ambrose, but she was the next best thing—a woman who loved his baby, who had loved his dead wife.

And me? Everyone assumed Evie was my biological mother, unless they learned otherwise.

Most of the time, that was how I introduced her. No step before the word mother, no hesitation. But every now and then, something stuck in my smooth thoughts like a splinter: the only reason Evie was my mom was because I’d lost my first one, When I was fourteen and taking bio, we did simple Punnett squares to determine hereditary features. My teacher walked around the room, checking our work. He looked at my little chart for curly hair dominance, and then at my poker-straight blond fall. He had met both Evie and my dad at Open School Night, so he knew Evie had wild black curls. “Your mom must have one recessive gene,” my teacher explained.

“My mom’s dead,” I said flatly.

Embarrassed, he told me I was exempt from the assignment.

That afternoon when I came home from school, I climbed up to the attic crawl space where my father kept my baby clothes and suitcases and boxes of old tax returns. Evie found me there and sat down cross-legged. “Should I guess what's wrong or are you going to tell me?” she asked. I shrugged, but she just leaned forward, her chin propped on her fist, and waited.

“We're studying genetics,” I said finally.

“Ah.” Evie’s voice was small. “You know,” she said, “I miss her, too.”

She told me to follow her. In the bedroom she shared with my dad, she pulled a small Rubbermaid container from her closet. Inside were photographs of my mother—alone, as a girl; in a white dress beside my father; holding me in her arms with a faraway gaze in eyes the exact same shade as mine. “She’s so pretty,” I whispered, and Evie smiled.

“Where do you think you get it from” she said.

She let me sift through the box—which held my hospital baby bracelet, broken shards of ceramic, strange files and saws that looked like instruments of torture, tickets to Broadway shows and a Billy Joel concert.

Evie picked up a string of photos, the kind you get from a booth at a fair, of my mother and her mugging at the camera. They looked only a few years older than me. “That,” she sighed, “was one of the best days. We went to the Washington County Fair in Richmond, summer of 1998. She’d never had cotton candy! What twenty-two-year-old has never had cotton candy?”

I let the ceramic pieces tumble through my fingers. “What are these?”

“The tools of her trade,” Evie said. “There were a lot of great artists who got their start at RISD, but I’ve never seen anyone do what she did with mosaics. Even when they were set in grout, they seemed to be alive. She was just getting her start-commercially when she found out she was having you. I think she would have eventually been famous, if she...” Evie looked up. “I hope you know that I would give anything to have her sitting here with you, instead of me.”

“If you miss her so much,” I asked, “then why did you put all these pictures away?”

Her face softened. “Because you were so little, and it confused you. And because every time your father was forced to remember she wasn't in the world anymore, it broke his heart.”

I wondered if she ever felt like she was betraying her best friend, falling in love with her husband. And then I immediately chastised myself. Everything Evie had ever done had been for my benefit. If she'd grown to love my dad, that only meant I grew up in a happy home.

It was why, I realized, I felt so guilty when I thought about Eloise Ambrose. It felt like I was being disloyal to Evie.

Three red ribbons, all cut the same length, curled in the bottom of the box. In the photo of Evie and my mom, her hair was woven through with a ribbon. As I looked at each picture, I saw the same thing—that stripe of red, twined with her white-blond hair, like a candy cane. I touched my finger to it. “She wore her hair like that every day,” Evie told me. “From the first moment she showed up at our dorm room to the morning she left for her doctor's appointment.”

I curled the ribbon around my finger. “Could you French-braid mine?” I asked.

Evie moved behind me and combed her fingers through my long corn-silk hair. She wove the ribbon through, tugged and twisted, tying off the bottom with a rubber band from her nightstand. “There,” she told me when she was done. “You look just like her.”

I’m thinking of this when we are finally seated at the Italian restaurant, the behemoth backpack between my feet as I fiddle with the frayed edges of the red ribbon falling over my shoulder. Evie braided my hair like that for a year, until I learned how to do it myself. “Thank you for the Panera delivery yesterday,” I say. Out of the blue, an Uber Eats driver had showed up at my desk with a you-pick-two meal I hadn’t ordered. “How did you know I was even in the office?”

She takes a sip of her water. “Because you'd texted me four Tik- Tok videos in an hour, and you only do that when you're avoiding paperwork.”

She’s not wrong.

“When I saw that the autumn salad was back on the menu, I couldn't resist.” She hums in delight. “The squash and the cranberries...”

“I don’t know why it’s not available year-round—” “Ladies?” The waiter interrupts our reverie. “Have you had a chance to decide?”

We glance at the menu, but I say, “We'll both have the chicken parm.”

As the waiter steps away, Evie shrugs. “The tagliatelle looked good but, you know.”

I nod gravely. “Unwritten rule.”

“If there’s chicken parm on the menu—” “You have to get it,” I finish.

Evie smiles, nodding.

“Oh!” I into my purse and hand her a Tide pen. She looks down at her chest. “Did I spill already?”

“No, but you’re having red sauce.”

“You’re right. Fait accompli,” Evie says. “Thanks for looking out for me.”

“Comes with the job,” I reply with a shrug. “Emergency preparedness?”

I shake my head. “Daughterhood.”

I drink the last of my water and look over my shoulder to see if the waitress is around for a refill, which is when I notice the entire back wall of the restaurant: a mosaic mural.

Evie follows my gaze. “Hers were nothing like that,” she says gently. “That’s... pedestrian. Your mother’s mosaics looked like the inside of Sagrada Familia. She made a mermaid from reclaimed wood from shipwrecks, and copper pennies. There was an archway in an admin building she designed with graduated blue stones that curled overhead like a wave, so it felt like you were surfing your way inside.”

I prop my chin on my fist. “What's the coolest installation she ever did?”

“Easy,” Evie says. “I came home one day from class when we were seniors and found her in the courtyard outside the dorm. She had boxes full of mirrors—wall mirrors, hand mirrors, mirrored trays, you name it—and she was hurling them against the brick of the building. I mean, it was like she had invented those rage rooms you can go to nowadays. She was dating your father by then, and I thought maybe something had gone wrong, and then I realized she was wearing gloves and safety goggles. It was for her senior project.” The waiter sets down a basket of bread. “It was about as tall as she was—a Valentine heart.”

“That doesn’t sound revolutionary.”

“Well, the devil was in the details. The pieces of glass had been cut and carved to be so tight that you couldn't see the individual shards. You'd look at the mural, and see your distorted reflection, like you were in a funhouse hall of mirrors. But the real art was in the places where the glass intentionally wasn’t flush. You had to do a double take, but you could just make out the finest line of white mortar between certain pieces, and it formed a line drawing of an anatomically correct heart.”

“Whoa,” I breathed.

“Yeah. Eloise called it Love Thyself. 1 went to her thesis defense, and she told the professors that the reflection was so blinding—and the urge to see oneself was so intense—that most people didn’t realize what was in the spaces between. She said people go through their lives missing what's right in front of them. But that just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.” Suddenly Evie blanches. “That day I saw her smashing mirrors, I told her she’d have seven years’ bad luck.”

That would have been in 1998. I reach for Evie’s hand and squeeze, thinking about how I don’t want the people I love to keep hurting. “Maybe it’s good,” I say gently, “that she only had three.”

One night, after showering, I wrap myself in a flannel robe that used to be Jesse’s, check to make sure that my phone volume is turned up, and turn on the eleven o'clock news. I sit on the edge of our bed to untangle my hair before braiding it back, but the footage on the screen makes the comb slip from my hand.

An American Airlines regional passenger jet had crashed into the Schuylkill River, just outside the Philadelphia International Airport.

It collided in midair with a Black Hawk military helicopter. Behind the reporter, in the inky night, are the red beacons of emergency vehicles and the shadows of first responders.

The fire commissioner starts speaking into a microphone at an impromptu press conference. “This evening at 9:42 an alert was sounded initiating a large regional response to an aircraft crash on approach to the airport,” he says. “This response includes the airport’s rescue firefighting unit, the Philadelphia Fire Department, and the Philadelphia Police Department. At 9:49, the first units arrived on the scene, found an aircraft in the water, and began rescue operations. This incident has grown. There are about three hundred responders working; we have police and Coast Guard and fireboats from all throughout the region. Conditions out there are extremely rough for the responders—it's cold and windy, and we are trying to keep them safe.”

He steps back, and the video shifts to a reporter, her hair blowing across her face. “This is still a developing story,” she says. “All we know right now is that the plane is in pieces and is sitting in water about eight feet deep.”

The news anchor’s grim face fills the screen. “Any word of survivors?” The reporter shakes her head. “No. But this is still being called a rescue operation, rather than a recovery.”

I feel a pang in my chest, empathy for my counterpart in the Philly Office of Emergency Management.

The bathroom door opens, and Jesse walks into the bedroom on a roll of steam. He’s wearing boxers and is scrubbing at his short buzz cut with a towel. “Remind me to fix that goddamn showerhead—” His voice breaks off as he sees the television.

“Plane crash,” I tell him. “Philly airport. Passenger jet and a military helicopter.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he breathes. “Why does this feel like déja vu?”

“Because almost the same exact thing happened a year ago in D.C.,” I say.

“Survivors?”

I shake my head. “Not yet.”

“I should offer aid,” I murmur, and Jesse’s arm tightens around my waist.

“Babe,” he says, “you can’t save everyone.”

I turn, frustrated. “Does that mean I shouldn’t try?” I stand quickly, intending to turn off the television, but suddenly the floor tips underneath me and I’m in Jesse’s arms.

“What the fuck, Molly?” he asks, gruff in his fear. I blink a few times. “I just stood up too fast,” I say.

His lips press together as he scans my face, and I watch him battle the urge to call me on my lie when I’m clearly upset.

“That could have been us,” I manage, spiraling. “A week ago, it was us.” What a privilege it is to fake-crash a plane.

“That’s why you do the drills, right?” Jesse says. I nod, still staring at the television screen.

“They do drills in Philadelphia, too,” he says gently, and he gathers me into his arms. Three days later, there are no confirmed survivors, and the Philly governor is blaming the federal dgovernment for the crash due to understaffing of air traffic controllers. Friction between government agencies and the people who are on the front lines of first response and public health has become a live wire.

In other words, it’s the worst possible time for a long-scheduled visit from two Feds in the CDC, who are coming to evaluate our performance for a grant we've already been promised.

In 2025, a gag order was placed on the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC, the NIH, and more, which cut public health off at the knees—since we literally exist to inform the populace about current and coming threats to well-being. At the CDC and NIH, career scientists were replaced by political cronies. As a result, these days, what my department gets from the Feds is rarely what we want or need.

Healthcare has always been political in this country. Black and brown residents have had to fight for access. Gay men who were afraid of being outed eschewed the mpox vaccine. The United States maternal mortality rate is three times higher than those of other high-income countries, and Black mothers are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white mothers.

I am the consummate diplomat and have become accustomed to playing along just to placate the hand that’s feeding us.

But it doesn’t mean I’m not salty.

Louella Griswald, who replaced the longtime physician who was the head of the CDC’s Division of State and Local Readiness, is indeed a doctor... of musicology. She has been reviewing how we allocate our money for three hours. Flanking Dr. Griswald are two of her lackeys; flanking me are Toby and Miguel. Toby is there to answer the CDC’s pointed questions; Miguel is there to keep me on a short leash as we are nickel-and-dimed.

“It seems you haven't been testing the notification protocol we asked states to implement,” Dr. Griswald says.

Toby and Miguel glance at me. No, we haven't.

It was one of their requirements for grant money—using a multidepartment APB for every drill and incident. “We haven't found it to be the best tool for our real-world experience,” I reply judiciously.

Griswald pushes her glasses up onto her head. “Be that as it may, I’m not asking for your opinion. Just for you to follow the protocol.”

Smoke is starting to come out of my ears, but Toby jumps in, redirecting the conversation. “I wanted to ask about page twenty-four,” he says.

I slip my phone from my pocket. Underneath the table, I launch the notification protocol that the CDC wants us to use.

Toby's phone pings. So does Miguel’s. I can hear similar dings on computers outside the room, then the door to the Emergency Operations Center flies open and the rest of my team rushes in. The second in command at the Rhode Island Department of Health—who happened to be in the building meeting with someone else—storms in, eyes wild. My phone and Miguel's ring at the same moment—his flashing with the number for the head of EMS, and mine with my boss—the director of RIDOH. It is utter chaos as I punch the speaker to connect. “What’s happening?” the director asks.

“Nobody knows what is happening,” I reply calmly, locking my gaze with Dr. Griswald’s. “Because the CDC’s notification protocol is not crafted correctly.” I glance around the room. “You’re all good to go,” I tell them, and I mutter a quick apology for wasting the director’s time.

“What kind of stunt is this?” Griswald asks.

I put away my phone. “All you care about is how long it takes for people to get here, so I was proving to you that yes, people can get here very quickly. Yes, there is merit to an emergency notification system. But we need to make sure we've got the right people, at the right moment. There are no protocols in emergency and disaster relief because every single event is different.”

I turn to Toby. “Did we have a spontaneous emergency last night?”

“Yes,” he says. “A nursing home fire.”

“Did I deploy the CDC’s notification protocol?” The tips of his ears burn pink. “You did not.”

“Correct. The facility needed immediate help getting residents out the door and safe. They needed to know if they could go back to the building after the fire was out. When they couldn't, they needed to know where to send residents, and how to get them there. I called three people on my team and told them what was happening. We sent out a notification to every nursing home and assisted living facility in the state, gathered the space availability, and called all the places close to the facility that had the fire—we built a plan with three of us—and then I called my director. If I had notified everyone at once, Dr. Griswald, it wouldn't have helped. It would have made the chaos of an emergency even more chaotic.” I finish, and then add, “With all due respect.”

The CDC director narrows her eyes at me. “I believe that’s all I need to know,” she says, and she and her team leave the room.

As soon as she’s out of sight, I groan and fall forward until my forehead hits the table.

“Jesus, Molly,” Miguel says. “You have a death wish?” Toby pats me on the shoulder as they both head out of the conference room.

Just then, my phone buzzes. I am expecting an all-caps text from my boss, potentially sacking me, but instead it’s a different colleague—Alysia Chen, a physician who is our liaison to all the hospitals in the state.

She was also who I called yesterday when Jesse insisted I get tested for anemia, because of my little swoon the night of the plane crash. I had told him I was just tired. But when Jesse refused to back down, Alysia had helped me out by running some quick tests.

Now, I glance down at her text. Meet for lunch?

Like me, she eats most lunches at her desk or inhales a fun-size Snickers bar and pretends that nuts are a food group. My fingers fly over the keyboard. Tell me if I’m dying, I joke.

Three dots... and then nothing.

Just kidding, I type.

She leaves me on read.

Oh, fuck.

I don’t normally visit Jesse at work, because I don’t want to draw attention to the way our jobs sometimes intersect. So when I approach the desk sergeant and ask for my husband to be called, I’m not surprised at the officer’s gentle ribbing. “The wife’s here,” he says into the receiver of his phone, grinning at me. “You must have done something really bad if she showed up in person...”

I force a smile, but I am still shaky. A minute later, Jesse appears, buzzing me through the secure door. “Hey!” he says. “Was I supposed to be expecting you?”

“No,” I force out, and then his eyes narrow on my face.

“What's the matter?” Jesse’s voice is a blade.

The tears I’ve managed to not cry spill over. Jesse swears under his breath and tugs me down the hallway to the room where he does polygraphs. The machine sits dormant beside the blank, blind eye of a computer screen.

“I’m not anemic,” I blurt out. “I’m pregnant.”

Jesse’s features shift—from disbelief, to awe, to a smile that feels like looking directly into the face of the sun. “What?” He picks me up and swings me around. “This is incredible!”

I push away from him. “This is awful.”

He goes very still. “You said you wanted kids.”

“Someday! Jesse, I’m twenty-five. I only just started to get respect as the chief of the department. Leaving now to have a baby would ruin my career.”

“First off, this is 2026, and being pregnant does not mean that you become a trad wife. Second, you may be twenty-five, but I’m forty, and I’d really like to play hockey with my kid before I need a knee replacement.”

I rub my temples. “This is not how it was supposed to happen.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s exactly how it’s supposed to happen,” Jesse says.

“I’m on birth control!”

“Which is not a hundred percent effective,” he points out. He takes a tentative step toward me. “How far along?”

“Eleven weeks.”

I can see him doing the math. Right now, anyway, in the state of Rhode Island abortion is legal until viability—around twenty-four weeks. Jesse struggles to meet my gaze. “So, then, you want to...” His voice trails off. He can’t say the words any more than I can.

I shake my head. “I don’t want to. But, Jesse—I have no idea how to do this.”

Jesse folds his arms around me. “My mom used to say that’s the dirty little secret of parenting. No one knows how to do it, much less do it well.” He draws back, tenderly running one hand down my long braid. “You already take care of all of Rhode Island, Mol. What’s one more tiny human?”

“I killed our only houseplant,” I remind him.

I wonder how my mother felt the day she learned she was pregnant. If she was scared like me, or elated like Jesse.

“We’ve got this,” Jesse says softly, confident. “I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

It is this—knowing I’m not alone, which is the specter that’s always haunted me—that lets me relax into Jesse’s arms. And on the heels of that comes another realization: This baby is already a part of me. I’ll never have to be alone again.

Which is both exhilarating and terrifying, just like any other unexpected event that blindsides us.