“Well,” Jim said, standing up straight again. He looked toward Franny, who hadn’t moved or smiled. “It’s a change, that’s for sure.” He narrowed his eyes at a spot on the ceiling, and Lawrence followed his gaze, finding nothing but a tiny crack in the white paint. “Think I’ll go shower off.”

Lawrence, Charles, and Franny all stayed exactly where they were, like actors in a play the moment before the lights came on, until they heard the bathroom door click shut. Charles was out of his chair and across the room before Lawrence could speak again. Lawrence watched as his husband drew Franny into his arms. Her arms wrapped all the way around Charles’s back, where she clasped her own wrist, the way sixth-grade boys knotted their arms around their dance partners. Franny’s thick shoulders began to jerk up and down, though her crying didn’t make a sound. Lawrence wished he could see Charles’s face, but it was pointing in the other direction.

“I’m really sorry,” Lawrence said. “I don’t know what happened,” meaning both that he didn’t know what had gone down at the magazine and that he didn’t know what had occurred in the three previous minutes. Neither Franny nor Charles made any sign that they had heard him. The kitchen smelled like warm food and tenderness. Lawrence knit his fingers together in his lap and waited for the moment to pass, which it did. Franny gave her head a shake and patted her damp cheeks with her fingers. Charles kissed her on the forehead and then returned to his chair. No one would have cried if they’d gone to Palm Springs and done nothing but had sex and read books for two weeks. Lawrence said a little prayer for the vacation he’d actually wanted, and then watched it—poof—float away. He needed Franny to stop crying, and then he needed his husband’s full attention, before someone else called the agency and claimed the child, before the open door was closed and their baby wasn’t their baby, before they were old and creaky and alone forever and ever, just the two of them and Charles’s paintings of other people’s children. He waited patiently, counting his breaths until he got to ten, and then starting over.

Sylvia woke up with a dry, open mouth. She’d had four glasses of wine at dinner, and the jet lag made her feel like she had cinder blocks tied to her ankles. She rolled onto her stomach and reached for the clock—her own clock, also known as her watch, also known as her iPhone, was on permanent airplane mode, lacking all of its usual distractions and conveniences, and she found the separation from the object jarring, as if she’d woken up and found that she was missing a finger. A good finger. It was something she hadn’t considered when her parents presented her with the notion of a trip to Spain. Of course the Internet was still there, whoring away at all hours, and she could get access to everything on her laptop. If the sensation of loss hadn’t been so great, Sylvia might have liked having a little distance from the rest of the world. The problem was you never knew what people were saying about you when you were gone. It was an even bigger problem than knowing what people were saying about you when you were within earshot.

The photos were taken at a party, one of the first “last parties” of the year. There was the last party at the park the cops never checked, there was the last party at someone’s free house, then the last party at someone else’s free house. The party in question had taken place at an apartment on the sixth floor of the Apthorp, a giant building on 79th Street, only five blocks from the Post family manse. Sylvia hadn’t wanted to go, but she had, because she did like some of the people she was graduating with, if not very many of them. When the photos surfaced on Facebook the next day, her skin slick with sweat, her eyes blurry from too many plastic cups full of cheap beer, her tongue in one boy’s mouth and then another and another, boys she didn’t even remember speaking to, she vowed to herself that she would never go to a party ever again. Or on the Internet. Moving to Spain was sounding better and better.

“Shit!” she said, looking at the time. She had three minutes to get dressed and downstairs before Joan would arrive. Sylvia pulled on her jeans and a black T-shirt from the pile on the floor. She leaned against the mirror and looked at her pores. There were girls at school who spent hours in the ladies’ room putting on makeup expertly, as though they were each teaching their own YouTube tutorial, but Sylvia didn’t know how, nor did she want to learn. It was almost impossible to change anything about yourself at a school you’d been attending since you were five—with every tiny step away from your former shell, someone was bound to say, “Hey! That’s not you! You’re faking!” Sylvia lived in fear of such fakery. Going to college was going to be amazing for many reasons, the first of which being the simple fact that Sylvia planned to be a completely different person the moment she arrived, even before she made her bed and pushpinned stupid posters on the walls. This new person was going to know how to put on makeup, even eyeliner. She stretched her mouth open and peered into her throat, thinking, not for the first time, that it was all completely and utterly hopeless and that she was almost certainly going to die a sad, lonely virgin who had accidentally gotten drunk and made out with every single boy at a party her senior year of high school, a slattern without the added benefit of actual sex. She dug through the plastic baggie she used for makeup until she found a tube of strawberry ChapStick and slathered it across her lips. She’d try harder tomorrow.

Lawrence pulled Charles into their bedroom as quickly as he could.

“What are you doing, my strange little munchkin?” Charles was amused, despite having just left Franny’s soggy embrace.

In lieu of an answer, Lawrence opened his laptop and spun it in Charles’s direction.

“Give me the phone,” Charles said. “What time is it in New York?”

It was just before five p.m. in New York, and they managed to catch the social worker before she was out the door. Deborah read them the details off a form: the baby weighed five pounds, ten ounces and was seventeen inches long, born to a twenty-year-old African-American mother. The father was Puerto Rican, but he was out of the picture. The birth mother had chosen their letter out of the book at the agency. The baby’s name, which they would of course be welcome to change, was Alphonse.

“Are you interested in proceeding?” Deborah waited.

Charles and Lawrence held the phone between their faces, both leaning forward, so that together their bodies formed a steeple. They looked at each other, eyes wide. Lawrence spoke first.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

Deborah explained what would happen next—they’d heard it before, but like everything important, the minute that it became a reality, they’d forgotten all the details. The birth mother could choose any number of families, and the agency would approach them all on her behalf. Once those families had said yes, the agency would go back to her with the list. The birth mother would then pick the winners, as it were. The choice was out of their hands.

“We’re in Spain,” Lawrence said. “Should we come home? Should we come home right now?” He glanced around their bedroom, calculating how long it would take them to pack and drive to the airport.

“Stay on vacation,” Deborah said. “Even if the birth mother does choose you, we’re looking at a couple of weeks before you’d be able to bring Alphonse home. If you can stay, stay. I’ll be in touch whenever I hear something, probably next week.” She hung up the phone, leaving Charles and Lawrence standing there, the precious object now silent between them.