I stroke a finger down Ruby’s cheek, feeling the soft, cherubic skin, staring into the innocent, ethereal eyes. The baby latches on to my index finger with her chubby little fist, the bones and veins tucked away under layers and layers of baby fat, the only time in one’s life when fat is adorable and heavenly. She plunges a finger into her mouth and sucks on it with a vengeance.

“I think she might be hungry,” I suggest—hopeful—but Willow says, “No. I tried. She wouldn’t eat.”

“I could try,” I offer, adding, “I know you’re tired,” careful not to usurp her role as the mother. The last thing in the world I want to do is offend Willow. But I know babies can be more confusing than preteen girls, more baffling than foreign politics and algebra. They want a bottle, they don’t want a bottle. They cry for absolutely no reason at all. The baby that devours pureed peas one day won’t touch them the next. “Whatever you think is best,” I say.

“Whatever,” she says, shrugging, indifferent. She hands me the one and only bottle she owns, filled with three or four ounces of formula, put together in the wee hours of morning. It’s curdled now and though I know Willow intends me to plunge this very bottle, this very formula, into Ruby’s cavernous mouth, I cannot. My hesitation makes the baby wail.

“Willow,” I say over the sound of Ruby’s hysterics.

She takes a drink of the coffee and flinches from the heat. “Huh?”

“Maybe I could wash out the bottle? Start again with fresh formula?”

Formula is horribly expensive. I remember. I used to cringe each and every time Zoe didn’t suck her baby bottles dry. When Zoe was born, I was a staunch believer in breastfeeding. The first seven months of her life, I relied on nothing but breast milk. I planned to do so for a year. But then things changed. Initially the doctor and I discounted the pain as an effect of childbirth. We went on as if all was normal.

But all was far from normal.

By then, I was pregnant again, pregnant with Juliet, though of course, there was no way to know at that point if she was a girl.

It had been less than six weeks since Juliet was conceived when the bleeding first began. By this time in her life, her heart was pumping blood and her facial features were taking form; arms and legs were about to emerge as tiny buds from her tiny body. I didn’t have a miscarriage; no, that, of course would have been too easy, too simple, for her to just die.

Instead, I made the decision to end my Juliet’s life.

Willow gives me a look that is hard to read. Wary and dubious, but also too tired to care. A handful of girls—college aged, in sweatshirts and flannel pants—pass by, huddled close together, arm in arm, under golf umbrellas and hoods, giggling, recalling hazy, drunken memories of last night. I overhear words: jungle, juice, pink, panty, droppers. I look down at my own attire and recall the purple robe.

“Whatever,” she says again, her eyes following the coeds until they round the corner, their laughter still audible in the slumberous city.

And so I hand the quivering child back to Willow and, releasing my umbrella, scurry to the nearest Walgreens where I pick up a bottle of water from the shelf and acetaminophen drops. Something to bring that temperature down.

When I return to our little alcove, I dump the used formula on the street, watching as it races into the nearest storm drain, then rinse out the bottle and start anew. Willow hands me the coveted formula powder and I mix up a bottle, and she returns Ruby to my arms. I plunge the bottle into the baby’s expectant mouth—full of hope that this will quiet the hysterical child—but she thrusts it out with a horrified look, as if I’d slipped formula laced with arsenic into her mouth.

And then she begins to scream.

“Shh...shh,” I beg, bouncing her up and down and I remind myself—already tired, already frustrated—that Willow did this all night. All night long. Alone. Cold. Hungry. And I wonder: Scared? Lightning flashes in the not-so-far distance, and I count in my head: One. Two. Three. Thunder crashes, loud and angry, full of wrath. Willow staggers, searching the heavens for the source of the jarring noise and I see in the way her eyes dilate that she’s scared. Scared of thunder, like a child. “It’s okay,” I hear myself say aloud to Willow, and instantly I’m transported back in time to Zoe’s preschool bedroom, cradling her body in my arms while she nuzzled her head into me. “It’s okay,” I say to her, “it’s only thunder. It won’t hurt you one bit. Not one bit at all,” and I see Willow staring at me, though the look in her blue eyes is impossible to read.

I’m absolutely soaking wet, as are Willow and Ruby, and the woman in the shop has the audacity to knock curtly on the glass door and tell us to go away. No loitering, her lips say.

“What now?” I ask myself aloud, and Willow responds in a hushed voice, more to herself than me: “Tomorrow is a new day,” she says, “with no mistakes in it yet.”

“Anne of Green Gables?” I ask and she says, “Yes.”

“Your favorite?” I ask, and she says that it is.

I’m slow to move, to draw Willow and her leather suitcase from the safety of the indigo awning and into the rain. “I bought a copy of Anne of Green Gables,” I confess. “On the way home last night. I’ve never read it before. I always wanted to read it. With my daughter, with Zoe. But she grew up too fast for it,” I say. It was as if I merely blinked, and the baby girl I once read board books to was suddenly too old to share a book with me, with her mother, because then, what would her friends at school think? It would be embarrassing if they knew, or so Zoe assumes.

A thought crosses my mind, as it often does in moments like this: if I had to do it all over, what would I do differently? If Zoe could be a baby again, a toddler, how would I be different? How would Zoe be different? Would things have been different with Juliet?

But of course, the question is entirely null and void, seeing as how there would be no more children for Chris and me.

“Did you and your mother read Anne of Green Gables?” I ask, wondering if she will humor me with this tidbit of personal information.

Hesitantly, she answers, “Matthew.”

“Matthew?” I repeat, worried that her confession will end there, with that one word.

But to my surprise she continues, the dark bangs shrouding her eyes as she watches a robin hunt for worms on the street. The first sign of spring. There are tiny buds on the trees that line the city streets, crocus shoots poking through holes in the sodden ground. “Matthew, my...” And she hesitates—there’s a distinct hesitation before she says, “my brother,” and outwardly I nod, but inwardly my heart leaps. One piece of the puzzle. Willow has a brother named Matthew. Willow has a brother, at all. A brother who read Anne of Green Gables.

“Your brother read Anne of Green Gables?” I ask, trying to ignore the peculiarity of it, of Willow reading a book such as Anne of Green Gables with her brother, a book that a mother and daughter should share. I want to ask her about her mother. About why she didn’t read the book with her mother. But instead, I say nothing.

“Yes.”

I see a wistfulness come over her when she mentions her brother. Matthew. A tinge of sadness, a mournful sigh.

I wonder about this Matthew and where he may be.

And then Ruby’s bloodcurdling scream makes me remember the acetaminophen. I tread lightly. “I think Ruby is running a fever,” I say. “I bought some Tylenol at the store. It might help.” I hand Willow the box so that she can see it is, in fact, Tylenol, that I’m not trying to drug her baby.

Willow looks at me with concern in her eyes and her voice becomes that of a child. “She’s sick?” she asks, her own naïveté showing through.