Apparently it didn’t matter so much who the baby belonged to anyway because all the doctor was concerned with was the baby’s angry fever as they stood in the office, desperate for some elixir, for some potion to remedy the baby.

I can hear in her voice that she’s tired. An image fills my mind: Heidi’s hair is a mess; she probably hasn’t showered all day. It’s likely stringy, like spaghetti noodles, as happens to Heidi when she hasn’t given it a good shampoo. There are bags under her haggard brown eyes, big, fat ones to boot, swollen and sore. She’s clumsy, I can tell, as in the midst of our conversation a can of pop misses the edge of the countertop and drops to the ground.

There’s a crash as I envision sticky brown liquid seeping into the hardwood floors.

“Shit,” she snaps, Heidi who never swears. I picture her dropping to all fours to wipe up the mess with a paper towel. Her hair falls in her face and she blows it away. She’s a damn mess, desperately in need of a shower and a good night’s sleep. Her eyes are erratic, a million thoughts running amok in her mind.

The situation has taken its toll on my wife.

Heidi says that she had lathered enough cream onto the baby’s bottom over the past few days that the doctor hardly mentioned the healing red rash. After ruling out all other causes of fever, the doctor used a catheter to get a urine sample and diagnosed the baby with a urinary tract infection.

“How’d she get that?” I ask Heidi, grimacing at the thought of that burning sensation every time the baby peed, of the catheter shooting up the urethra and into her tiny bladder.

“Poor hygiene,” she says simply, and I’m reminded of the baby sitting in that shitty diaper for God knows how long. The bacteria in the feces climbing back up into the bladder and kidneys. Festering.

The baby’s on antibiotics now, her mother under doctor’s orders to wipe from front to back. The very thing Heidi badgered me about when Zoe was still in diapers. I imagine Willow sitting on the sofa now, staring at the TV in a daze, as she’s prone to do. She’s not eighteen, I remind myself, picturing some kid that still needs to be reminded to wash her hands. To eat her vegetables. To make her bed. To wipe her baby’s rump from front to back.

I’m still waiting to hear back from Martin Miller, PI. I’m thinking long and hard of ways to hurry this along, some kind of information I can give him, though my own internet searches have hit a dead end. I considered a picture, but highly doubt Willow Greer would let me snap a photo of her, or that Heidi would give me the A-okay. I consider that old suitcase, brown and worn, the one she tucks beneath the sofa bed when she isn’t in the room, as if we might forget it’s there. I thought about snooping inside to see if I could find something, some kind of clue, a driver’s license or state ID, a cell phone with a contact number.

And then Martin suggested fingerprints, suggested snagging some glass or the remote control, something she touched that would validate an identity she couldn’t fake. He walked me through it, how to preserve Willow Greer’s fingerprints so he could send them to his lab.

But all that will have to wait until after my trip.

I have yet to receive a tweet from W. Greer, which leads me to believe she’s dead. That she did it, like she said she would, that she ended her life.

Or maybe she’s lying low in some Chicago condo, wanting the world to believe she’s dead. How the hell would I know? But still, I check every day, just in case.

“She was interested in her birthmark,” Heidi tells me then, interrupting my thoughts.

“Who was?”

“The doctor.”

“The baby’s birthmark?” I ask, remembering the one that stared at me from the back of the baby’s leg when Heidi removed our blue towel from her buttocks and wiped her clean.

“Yeah,” she says. “Says it’s called a port-wine stain,” and I imagine a glass of merlot spilled across the back of that leg. Heidi says something about vascular birthmarks and capillaries expanding and the dilated blood vessels beneath the baby’s skin. And that’s when she says to me that, according to the doctor, we might want to have them removed. With laser treatment. She says it as if this is something we really might want to consider having done. We. She and me. As if it’s our baby we’re discussing.

I imagine my wife, talking into the phone with her spaghetti hair and haggard eyes, stating with this blank expression on her face, “The doctor said they can be embarrassing for kids as they get older. That they’re easier to treat in infancy because the blood vessels are smaller.”

I’m speechless. I can’t respond. I open my mouth and close it again. And then, for lack of anything better to say, I ask, “How’s Zoe?” and Heidi says, “Fine.”

I never say a thing about the birthmark.

As the conversation drifts from birthmarks to the weather, I realize how exhausted Heidi sounds, pulled to the limit, like a stretchy toy that’s been yanked too far and won’t go back to its original shape. I almost feel sorry. Almost.

But then my mind drifts back to Heidi and me in our prebaby days—before Zoe, before the abortion that rattled Heidi’s world much more than she cared to admit—when we would take the steps, two at a time, to the rooftop deck of the apartment where we lived at the time, to watch the fireworks erupt from Navy Pier every Saturday night. I think of the way we sat together, on the same lounge chair, drinking from the same bottle of beer, staring at the city’s skyline: the John Hancock Building, the Sears Tower long before it’d been renamed. We had so many aspirations back then: to travel the world and see things—the Great Wall of China, the Blue Caves of Greece—to compete in a triathlon together. Plans that fell by the wayside as soon as we had a kid. I never wanted to be one of those couples, one of those couples so consumed with their individual ambitions and their kids, that the marriage got kicked to the curb, ignored and neglected by seemingly more important aspects of life.

What I wanted in our marriage was for us to be a team. Heidi and me. But these days it feels as if we’re nothing but opponents, opponents playing for rival teams. I start to feel bad for her, in this mess with that girl and the baby, all alone.

And yet, I think, considering the haggard eyes and the spaghetti hair, this is her doing.

But still, I can’t get that note out of my mind, the one in the briefcase with the single word: Yes. I pulled it out at the airport, on the plane. I pulled it out once we’d checked into our hotel, a luxury hotel in the heart of New York City. I pulled it out again after Cassidy, Tom, Henry and I had parted ways at the check-in desk, and Cassidy had said, “Toodle-oo,” with a one finger wave. I sat on the crisp, white bed in my stately room—staring at the view out the window: a bird’s-eye view of the building next door, not ten feet away, nothing but brick and windows—and pulled that note out and held it in my hand. I found myself appraising everything about that note: where she got the purple sticky note, the jaggedness of the letters. Was she nervous when she wrote it, short on time, jarred by the baby? Or did her handwriting just suck more than mine?

I wonder when she wrote the note: ten o’clock, right after we’d gone to bed and she heard, through the cracks of the door, Zoe’s breathing morph into a snore, or sometime in the middle of the night, forced to my briefcase by sleeplessness, by plaguing memories of being hurt by someone that kept her tossing and turning all night long. Or maybe it was early in the morning, awakened by the sound of my alarm clock, when she tiptoed to the briefcase by the front door as I turned on the shower and stepped inside.

Who knew?

And now, a day later, my meetings done for the day, a rendezvous with Tom, Henry and Cassidy planned in the hotel’s bar in some twenty minutes, I debate telling Heidi about the note. But what good would it do? It would throw Heidi into a nosedive, that’s what it would do. Having proof that the girl was abused—or at least a claim of abuse—would be enough for Heidi to suggest we keep her. Forever. Like the damn kittens. They’re staying.