A Wonder Yet to Come

Andy wasn’t sure when the moment broke—whether it was the heaviness in his arms, the slow even drift of the baby’s breathing, or the warmth of Laura’s hand layered over his—but at some point the sun made it clear: the world was moving again, and it would not be ignored.

He blinked, more to reset the present than because he was tired, and looked at Laura. She was watching him, both bodies turned his way, faces soft. The baby squirmed in his lap, eyes closed but hand still latched on to Floppy’s paw, her own tiny fingers working the frayed edge as if they could will it back to new.

“I think she’s hungry,” Laura said. Both of her spoke together, not so much in stereo as in a double-layered chorus, the same sentence arriving from two points in the room at once, one thought with two throats to leave by.

Andy stood, careful with the baby, and for a weird second he imagined what it would look like to anyone else: him cradling a baby he’d never met, both of Laura’s bodies clearing the way, and Floppy’s half-chewed ear hanging from the baby’s mouth like a soggy blue cigarette. The visual made him smile, in spite of the knot he could still feel behind his ribs.

Downstairs, the house kept up the illusion that they’d always lived here. Every little thing was right where it should be, but in the uncanny way of a childhood bedroom you hadn’t seen in twenty years—sharper, smaller, but so much more precise than you remembered. The kitchen was already bright, sunlight coming in at an angle that set everything aglow. The highchair stood at the head of the table, like it had been waiting its whole life for this exact morning.

Laura motioned for him to set the baby down. She handled the buckles on the highchair’s strap with an offhand confidence that seemed to surprise her too; both bodies working together, she clicked the harness into place without once looking away from the baby’s face. “It’s like you’ve done this a thousand times,” Andy muttered, but Laura just smiled, then wiped the baby’s chin where a trail of drool had started to pool.

Andy started to ask what the baby could actually eat at her age, then realized he was already halfway to the pantry. He reached for the handle and found himself half-expecting it to be empty, or full of nothing but canned soup and powdered drink mix. Instead, the first box on the shelf was cereal: not just any cereal, but the exact off-brand fortified O-shaped cereals his own mother used to buy at the dollar store. The sight of it—blue box, cartoon bee on the label—was like being jump-cut back to age six, eating dry handfuls at the kitchen table and listening to cartoons on a tiny TV.

He plucked the box off the shelf, turned to Laura, and waggled it in her direction. “I see your subconscious went with the classic,” he said.

She didn’t look up. “It was the only one on sale,” she replied, both mouths moving at once, voices perfectly matched. One of her set a bowl on the tray, the other passed him a spoon.

“Your attention to detail as a preteen was honestly terrifying,” Andy said, half under his breath as he poured the cereal out in a neat spiral.

Laura shrugged, one set of arms already prepping a bib she’d found draped on the back of the highchair, printed with bright pink stars and a cartoon frog. “It’s not me,” she said. “It’s the house. I just gave it the prompts.”

Andy filled the bowl with milk and set it in front of the baby. Before he could grab the spoon, she immediately plunged both hands in, more splash than scoop, and came up with a handful that went straight to her mouth and then half on to the bib. The rest rained down onto the tray and the tile floor, a confetti of O’s and milk dots.

“That’s a violation of the Geneva Convention,” Andy said, mock-horrified as the baby smeared cereal across her face, her whole body shivering with delight.

Laura, both faces, made a noise between a laugh and a groan. She reached to intercept a milk-drenched O just as it launched off the tray and missed, her hand landing over Andy’s instead. She left it there a beat longer than the grab required. He wiped his thumb across the baby’s cheek to clear a glob of cereal, then licked it absentmindedly.

The baby squealed, triumph in the sound, then went for round two.

For a few minutes, it was nothing but the sound of small hands working against physics, Andy desperately trying to feed the baby, the baby giggling, and Andy trading a new round of jokes for every new mess made. Laura, for her part, kept pace with the cleanup, a constant whir of paper towels and wet wipes, never letting the chaos get more than a move or two ahead.

It was in the lull—after a particularly big spoonful ended up on the baby’s forehead and Andy paused to mop it off—that the quiet changed. He leaned in, softening his voice, and said, “We could call her Sarah. We could honor her that way.”

Both of Laura’s faces went perfectly still, the wet wipe poised just above the baby’s wrist, the other hand mid-reach with a fresh bib. The pause stretched. The only sound in the room was the slow, rhythmic tap of the baby’s fingers on the plastic tray, the distant hum of the fridge, and the sound of Floppy hitting the tile floor.

Andy waited. Something about the shape of the sentence he’d just said snagged on the way past, as if he’d heard himself say it before. He let it go and didn’t fill the silence.

Laura finally spoke, her voice a little unsteady, though she masked it well. “I—no. Not Sarah,” she said, the answer coming out with a gentleness that made it more final than it had any right to be. She looked at him, both sets of blue eyes unreadable. “It’s bad luck, naming her after my mother.” She finished the wet-wipe pass, her hand brushing the baby’s hair, soft as a moth wing.

Andy nodded, not pressing. “It was just a thought,” he said, and meant it. He bent, fished Floppy out from under the highchair, and set the bunny back on the tray within reach. The baby closed a fist around its ear without looking.

The baby, oblivious, returned to work on the cereal, this time inventing a new technique involving two fingers and a complex wrist flick that launched O’s all the way to the far side of the table. Andy tracked one as it bounced off the wood and under the radiator.

Laura wiped the tray down in a single smooth arc, then, after a breath, added: “A name sticks. Whether or not you get to keep the person, the name is always there. If we named her today—really named her—it would make leaving this afternoon even worse than it already is going to be.”

There was a moment where the words just hung between them, both bodies stepping on the same beat, one hand trailing the wall while the other reached ahead for the closet door, nothing moving except the baby’s slow, relentless drumming on the tray.

Andy said, “We’ll know when we see her, for real.” He meant it, and maybe Laura did too, because her spoon—when she went to feed the next bite—stopped midair, her eyes meeting his and holding there for a second that seemed to have no end.

She blinked, shook it off, and resumed. “That’s the plan,” she said. She fed the baby, who accepted the spoon with dignity, then immediately bit down and refused to let go.

The fridge cycled off. Outside, a car went past slow enough that Andy could hear salt crunching under its tires.

Andy caught the next spoonful before it launched. Laura got the soaked bib off and a dry one tied on without the baby noticing. When the baby crammed a fistful of cereal into Andy’s ear, he laughed hard enough that she copied the sound back at him, badly, and kept doing it for the rest of the meal.

They finished feeding the baby, and for a few minutes there was only the aftermath: a kitchen table polka-dotted with O’s, dribbled arcs of milk turning tacky as they dried, and the slow, relentless percussion of the baby’s fist tapping the tray, punctuated by a long, self-satisfied “Ma-ma-ma. Da-da-da,” delivered to nobody in particular. Laura cleaned the baby’s mouth with a swipe that was both tender and efficient, then lifted her from the highchair. The baby went limp in her arms, Floppy once again jammed in her mouth, happy as a python after a meal.

Andy started gathering plates and mugs, intending to just load them into the dishwasher, but when he got to the sink he found it already half full—bowls, cups, even a saucepan or two. None of them looked like they’d been used that morning, or any morning he could remember. There was a fork that had dried egg still stuck to the tines, but when he picked it up, he couldn’t remember anyone actually having eggs. There was a juice glass with a fingerprint smudged in orange, but neither of them had poured juice.

He set to washing, rolling up his sleeves and scrubbing each dish clean before setting it on the drying rack. Laura drifted in beside him, the baby propped on her hip, and used the other body to towel things dry as soon as he put them down.

Andy offered the baby a clean wooden spoon to distract her from Floppy, but she wanted nothing to do with it. She just gnawed the bunny’s ear harder, drool slicking the faded fur, her eyes watching the sunlight creep across the countertop.

Andy liked this: the steady rhythm of wash and dry, the nearness of Laura, even the sound of the baby’s satisfied chewing. It was all so relentlessly ordinary that it felt almost defiant.

After a while, he said, “Does the yard get sun in the afternoon?” The question sounded silly as soon as it left his mouth, but he let it sit there anyway.

Laura didn’t answer right away. She paused, looked out the window above the sink, and squinted as if she could fast-forward the day and see for herself. “After lunch, it does. The trees block most of it in summer, but in winter, it hits the porch. You can see the old shadows on the snow where the fence used to be.”

Andy looked out, saw it too: a crust of snow, the low hedge, the patio stones peeking through like misplaced teeth. He wondered who had last walked there.

“Do the guest rooms ever get used?” he asked, just to say something else.

Laura kept drying, but her hands slowed. The baby’s hand patted her arm, as if reminding her to stay on task. “Not really,” she said. “I used to wonder, when I built this house in my head—if anyone would ever sleep in them. Or if I was just making a place that was too big for the amount of love I’d ever get.”

She said it so matter-of-fact that Andy had to put down the plate he was drying. He turned and looked at her properly. Both faces were in profile, but the sadness was there, painted across each one in the shape of her mouth.

He said, “It feels exactly the right size now.”

Laura’s lips curled up, both sides, and she didn’t look at him, but her voice was warm. “That’s just because you’re standing in it.”

Andy smiled, and for a long moment, nothing else needed to be said.

---

After the last of the breakfast dishes were dried and put away, Laura set the baby down on the living room rug, where she hauled herself upright on the coffee table, took three wobbling, top-heavy steps, then gave up and finished the trip to the radiator at a crawl. Floppy, soggy and half-flattened, trailed from her fist like a soft blue anchor.

“I think there’s a stroller in the closet,” Laura said, stretching both sets of arms above her head in a way that looked more feline than human. She didn’t wait for Andy to answer, just padded down the hallway, both bodies stepping on the same beat, one hand trailing the wall while the other reached ahead for the closet door.

Andy followed, found her already digging through the coats and old rain boots in the entry closet. She came out with a stroller that looked both brand new and, somehow, as if it had already been through a decade’s worth of playgrounds and mall parking lots. He took it, popped the foot brake, and then spent a full sixty seconds wrestling with the unlabeled latch before it finally clicked open with a mechanical snap.

Laura watched, both faces wearing the same smile that said, “I could have done that, but I’m letting you have this one.” The baby, deposited into his arms for the process, immediately tried to eat the stroller’s safety harness.

“She’s going to gnaw through her own straps at this rate,” he said, threading the baby’s arms through the puffy coat sleeves. The coat had been hanging right there in the closet, the right size, pale pink with a fake-fur hood. Andy rolled up the sleeves twice so her hands could stick out.

He looked at Laura, waiting for her to point out the absurdity of how well the dream had stocked itself. But Laura just held out the matching hat, then the tiny mittens, both with the tags already cut off.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Let’s go,” said Laura, in perfect harmony. The front door opened onto a January street identical to a dozen others in Saddle Ridge—old houses set back from the curb, mailboxes half-buried in icy slush, salt stains painting the sidewalk white at the edges. The air was bright and brittle, the kind that numbed your cheeks before you’d gotten to the end of the driveway.

They set off with no plan, Andy pushing the stroller, neither him nor Laura bothering with a coat, although one of Laura’s bodies still wore the blue pom-pom hat. Laura’s two bodies walked beside him, trading off which one was closest to the stroller, each matching his pace with a quiet, measured stride.

A man two houses down was chipping ice off the lip of his driveway with the flat of a shovel. He looked up, saw the three of them, and raised a gloved hand in a neighborly wave. Andy waved back before he could stop himself.

Laura broke into a laugh—just a shade too loud for the quiet street. “Did you just—” She grinned at him, both faces equally incredulous. “You just did the Suburban Dad Wave.”

Andy feigned offense. “It’s called good manners. Some of us respect the social contract.”

Laura nudged his elbow. “Next thing you’ll be posting about property taxes on Nextdoor.”

He shrugged. “Give me a couple years. I could really lean into it.”

For a while, they just walked, the only sound the soft roll of stroller wheels and the crunch of salt underfoot. Laura kept glancing sideways at the baby, who sat upright with the alert, slightly stunned expression all babies get in fresh cold air. She pointed out a house on the corner—a ranch with blue shutters and a flag hanging off the porch.

“That one,” she said, “was always the popular family house in my head. The one with the pool nobody remembered them building, where everyone ended up after the last day of school.”

Andy looked at the closed curtains, the cracked basketball hoop above the garage. “You know who lived there?”

Laura shook her head, both bodies in perfect sync. “Never gave them a backstory. They just existed for narrative convenience.”

Andy studied the house. Whoever actually lived there had a real name and a real mortgage and no idea they’d been cast, thirty years ago, as extras in a thirteen-year-old’s better life. He could see the fun in pretending anyway. He let the silence sit a few steps, then: “What about the house behind it? Who lived there?”

She grinned, the right-hand Laura glancing sideways at him. “Honestly? Nobody. I never filled it in. It was just… blank. I didn’t know enough people, I guess.”

Andy considered this. “What else did you never fill in?”

The question was a joke—half a prod, half curiosity—but Laura took it seriously. She slowed her steps, both bodies falling in together, and after a few beats she said, “I never figured out what you did for work. In this version, I mean. I always assumed I’d be a doctor, and that whatever you did, we’d have enough to afford a house with a yard and four bedrooms. But I never decided what job actually paid for all this.”

Andy looked down at the baby, at her perfect, round face, the damped-down energy of a child taking in the world for the first time.

“We could say I’m a consultant,” he offered. “Or a private investigator for lost causes.”

Laura snorted. “No way you’d ever do consulting. Too many meetings.”

“Hey, do you have any idea how many meetings I had while building Aural? Besides, I’d do it for you,” Andy said, and he meant it. “I could see myself suffering through a weekly standup just to see you happy.”

Laura grinned, both faces, and said, “You always say the worst stuff like it’s the truth.”

He smiled back, and they walked on, the sky a low and even gray, light diffused over the roofs and the cracked sidewalk ahead.

Halfway down the block, the baby started fussing—a soft, whiny mewl at first, then a steady escalation toward real crying. Laura crouched next to the stroller, both bodies leaning in, arms extended to check the coat, the hat, the straps. “It’s okay,” she said, and Andy couldn’t tell whether she was talking to the baby or to herself. The right-hand Laura unzipped the coat a bit, the left smoothed the baby’s hair.

Andy crouched, too, careful not to tip the stroller. He said, “She’s not hurt, she’s just bored.”

They both made gentle, nonsense noises for a few minutes—“Hey, buddy,” “Almost home,” “You’re so tough”—and eventually the baby’s crying faded to a wet, hiccupy grumble.

Laura straightened first, watching the baby through the clear plastic shield on the stroller. She shook her head. “I don’t know how people do this without a house full of other women to hand a crying baby off to when their patience runs out.”

Andy smiled, dusting road salt off his palms. “You’re doing it by yourself right now.”

Laura, both faces, looked at him, then at the baby. “Not really by myself, though, am I.”

He let that hang, then nudged her shoulder with his. “You get points for not calling in backup yet.”

She said nothing, just nudged him back, and the three of them kept walking, the baby settling into a quiet, drooling inspection of Floppy and the motion of the world.

They turned back at the end of the block. By the time they reached their own driveway, the baby was asleep, her face pressed sideways into the fur lining of her hood, one mittened hand still tangled in Floppy’s ear.

Andy parked the stroller by the porch and looked up at the house—at the brick, the snow on the roof, the faint curl of steam rising from the vent above the kitchen window. He turned to Laura, both bodies standing close together, the sun catching in her hair.

“I could do this forever,” he said. Not a question, not a challenge, just the shape of the day’s contentment.

Laura smiled at him, one face, then the other, and said, “I know.”

They lingered there on the porch, not talking, letting the cold bite their faces and the stillness settle around them, as if the world could pause at just this perfect, ordinary point.

---

Upstairs, the house was silent but for the baby’s shallow, even breathing behind the cracked nursery door. Andy tiptoed past once, just to make sure, and found her sleeping face-up in the crib, one arm reaching out across the sheet, Floppy’s ear clutched in her fist. He watched her for a long minute, heart squeezing with the knowledge that he would never, ever forget this, even though it would only last a few more hours.

He found Laura on the back steps, already outside, perched on the wide wooden stair that led down to the patchy backyard. She’d put on two hooded sweatshirts over her shirts, and both of her bodies sat folded in close, knees drawn up, arms crossed loosely over her chests. Her breath steamed white in the January air, and even though she was wearing two sets of everything, she looked small.

He sat between her, and she tucked herself—both of herself—tight into his sides, resting her heads on his shoulders. The steps were cold, but the sun had started to cut through the bare branches, and the patch of yard near the fence was alive with light.

They sat together for a while, saying nothing. A sparrow picked at something half-buried in the grass, its head darting up every time the wind shifted. Beyond the fence, the world went on as if there were no such thing as grief or memory or magic, just the slow work of animals doing what they’d always done.

After a long time, Andy said, “You okay?”

Laura didn’t answer, not right away. Both faces stayed fixed on the yard, her eyes moving only when the bird hopped to a new patch of grass. He could feel her anxiety. She reached up, absently, and fingered a loose bit of thread on the cuff of her sleeve, twirling it until it unraveled even further.

Andy didn’t press. He just kept his hands on her backs, tracing slow, meaningless circles through the fabric, patient and steady.

They stayed like that until the bird was gone, and the patch of sunlight had crept a little further up the steps.

Then Laura spoke, both mouths at once, so quiet he almost missed it. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “I’ve been carrying it since before we even got on the elevator this morning.”

Andy turned, shifting to look at her directly, both bodies, both faces. “I’m listening,” he said, and meant it.

Laura worked at the frayed thread until it snapped off, then rolled it between her fingers for a full minute before she spoke.

It took Laura a long time to say it. There was a stretch of silence—enough that Andy almost thought she’d changed her mind, or that she’d lost the thread entirely, and maybe that was for the best, maybe this day could just coast on its own inertia, with the baby sleeping and the sun warming the steps and nothing left to overturn. But the way she picked at the cuff with her thumb, worrying the fibers to a fuzz, told him she hadn’t given up the idea, only that she was caught in the act of weighing whether it was kinder to him, to herself, to speak the words or leave them in the vault.

“I went to see Arabella,” she said, at last, and it was so quiet that at first Andy thought she was talking with only one mouth, but then he realized both voices had come together, doubled under the breath. “Yesterday. Sam knew I suspected, I made her promise to sit on it, but nobody knew I went. I’ve been… I’ve felt tired all week, coffee suddenly repulses me, and I—” She broke off, not from hesitation but to steal a glance at him from the side, to weigh his readiness against her own. “But it wasn’t the symptoms that sent me. Those I could argue with. It was the thing underneath them. Like my body already knew, and my head was playing catch-up.”

Andy didn’t say anything, which for him was as close as he came to holding his breath. His hand stopped moving on her back, then his whole arm, then the rest of him as if a circuit had flipped somewhere inside. He was rigid, all at once, not cold but braced for impact, like someone who’d just heard a tree fall in the next room and was waiting for the world to catch up.

Laura went on, voice steady now. “Arabella confirmed it. No hedging, no riddles, she just said it outright: I am pregnant. Three weeks, maybe less. She said I’d already done the hard part, just catching up to myself.”

Her faces both turned away from him at that, and Andy recognized the move: splitting her awareness between the memory and the need to survive it. One self to deliver the news, the other to shield her from what the news might do to him.

After a long, brittle silence, Andy found his voice. It came out low and scraped thin, and all it managed was her name. He said it once, then again, and when that turned out not to be enough: “What else did she say?”

Laura shook her head. “She told me the sex.” She picked at the loose thread again, not looking at him. “But before that, she said something I’m still trying to work out. She said—” A pause. One face turned slightly inward, the other staying fixed on the yard. “She said there’s only one. Not one each. Just one, somehow, between both of me. Like I’m—” She stopped, pressing her lips together. “I don’t know how to say it. I don’t think there are words for it yet. And she made a face, like she was struggling with the idea, too.” She let the thread go. “It’s a girl,” she said, quietly, and the words landed between them like something set down very carefully, afraid to break.

Andy closed his eyes, and when he opened them again they were bright with something that could have been laughter or tears or a fever, or all three. The shine at the edges made his whole face look new, and Laura went still looking at it, as if she hadn’t seen this one before.

He tried to laugh, just once, but the sound didn’t make it out of his mouth. Instead he just breathed, a slow and careful exhale, and repeated: “A girl.” He tasted the word, like he thought it might dissolve if he didn’t keep it close to his tongue. “Are you scared?”

That unlocked something in Laura, both faces going still at once, as if the only honest way to answer was together. “Terrified,” she said. The word came out small, and she didn’t try to make it bigger. “Not because I don’t think I can do it. I know I can. I’m just—” She swallowed, and the sound echoed in the cold air. “Now there’s two of us. Not just me and the countdown, but me, and her, and the clock, and I don’t know how to hold it all at once. I don’t even know how to measure it.”

Andy wrapped both arms around her, both of her, pulling her in with a force that made her ribs ache in a good way. “You don’t have to,” he said, and this time his voice was solid, grounded. “I don’t know how to hold it either. But I’m not leaving. I’m right here. Nothing, nothing, changes how hard I’ll fight for this. For both of you.”

Laura pressed her faces against his shoulder, burying them in the cotton and the faint smell of him. She trembled, but it was partly relief, partly some deep muscle memory of being wanted and kept safe.

Andy stroked her back, not in gentle circles anymore but in long, grounding lines, like he was trying to talk her body into staying solid, here, now. He didn’t say anything else for a long time, because sometimes the only thing that helps is the repetition of presence, the physical fact of another heartbeat beside your own.

Above them, the sky went glassy and white, and the sparrow that had been picking at the grass vanished somewhere beyond the fence. The world kept moving. Through the bond, Andy could feel that for Laura it hadn’t.

She didn’t say how much it meant. She stayed where she was, both of her folded into him, one shape against the cold, until Andy stopped being able to tell which of her was shaking.

They sat on the step until the sun had cleared the roofline and the cold had gone out of the wood beneath them. When Laura finally looked up, her faces were wet, and she looked surprised by it, as if she hadn’t noticed starting. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand—both hands, both faces—and gave Andy the smallest, realest smile he’d seen from her all day.

“Thank you,” she said, and it sounded so simple that it hurt.

Andy kissed the top of one head, then the other, and they stayed there, neither moving, neither willing to be the one to let go first.

They sat on the back steps holding each other, then got up, moving through the house in a gentle hush. Neither of them had the energy for words, or maybe they were saving them for whatever waited outside the dream’s edges.

At the base of the stairs, Andy hesitated, hand still wrapped in Laura’s. “Should we look in on her one more time before we go?”

Laura answered before he finished asking. “Yes,” she said, both voices, both bodies already taking the first step up.

They climbed in silence, hand in hand. The nursery door stood ajar, the rectangle of light on the hallway carpet precisely the shade of gold that meant mid-afternoon, a time neither of them remembered arriving at. Andy pushed the door gently.

The room was empty.

Not just empty—the air had a vacuum to it, a clean, waiting stillness. The crib was bare, the blanket neatly tucked, the mattress flat and undented. The board books lined up perfectly on the shelf. Floppy was gone.

Laura stopped in the doorway. Both bodies froze, and for a second it was impossible to tell if she was breathing at all.

Andy stepped in after her, scanning the corners of the room, half-hoping the baby had simply managed to crawl out and was waiting under the window seat. But there was nothing—no trace, not a forgotten sock or a single fleck of drool.

He tried to speak, but the words didn’t come. He had the sudden, dizzying conviction that this was the way it was always supposed to end—that you could have a perfect day, but the morning after, the world started over and reset all the counters to zero.

He said, at last, “The first time, there was never anyone in here to lose. Just the room. Empty from the start.”

Laura nodded, slow, both faces turned toward the crib. “This time is different,” she said, each word careful, placed like a stone on a riverbank. “There was someone here. Even if neither of us can ever prove it.”

She stepped forward and rested both hands on the crib rail, the same place where tiny fists had gripped just hours ago. She didn’t cry, but her shoulders went sharp and uneven, and for a second Andy thought she might just collapse over the edge.

After a minute, she whispered, “Some part of me is weeping. Some part of me feels like something has taken root, not just ended.”

Andy moved behind her, set his hands gently on her shoulders. For a moment he didn’t say anything, just looked at the crib with her.

“Maybe she didn’t vanish,” he said finally. “Maybe she just—went back to wherever wishes go when they’re not ready yet.” He paused, choosing the next words slowly. “You’re pregnant with a girl, Laura. What if that’s what today was? Not a loss. A preview.”

Laura was very still. He could feel her breathing change.

“Like the Hotel was showing us,” he continued, quieter now, “what’s already on its way. Before she’s real,” he finished. “Before we have to be scared of losing her for real reasons.”

Laura leaned back into him, and he felt the stiffness run out of her all at once, replaced by something slower and more complicated than relief. She didn’t answer right away. When she did, she was careful with the idea, the way she’d be careful with something that could break.

“Maybe,” she said. “I want that to be what it was.” Her hands stayed on the rail. “I still feel like something was taken.”

She reached out and touched the smooth wood one more time—not a goodbye, exactly, more like a marker, a note left for someone who would arrive later. Then she turned to face him, and her hands found his.

Together, they left the room, hands still clasped, both of them moving slower than before. In the hallway, as they passed the second guest room, Andy paused, then went inside, stopping at the closet door. He didn’t say why, but Laura watched him, both faces quiet and patient, as if she’d already run the scenario in her mind and decided to let it play out.

Andy opened the closet, which smelled faintly of cedar and clean laundry. On the top shelf, exactly where Laura had showed him last time, Floppy waited, blue and battered and one-eared, and freshly laundered. Andy reached up, took the bunny, and turned it over in his hands.

He hesitated, then opened his Inventory. The bunny slipped inside with a soft, final weight, a gravity that was heavier than its fabric and stuffing. He closed the door, stood for a second, and turned to see Laura watching.

She looked at his hands, saw they were empty, then looked at his face. Her eyes went glassy, like they might spill over any second, but instead she just stepped forward and pressed her palm flat to his chest. She didn’t speak. She didn’t ask. Her palm stayed flat over his sternum, pressing, the way you press on a door to make sure it’s shut.

She took his other hand, folded it between both of hers, and led him toward the door.

As they reached the threshold, Laura said, “I’m not sure the next part of the date will hit the same, after this.” She tried to make it a joke, and almost succeeded.

Andy squeezed her hand. “We’ll take it as it comes.”

They walked out together, leaving the house behind. The world outside was cold and sharp, but it felt less empty now, and the memory of the baby—of Floppy, of the half-day they’d just lived—followed close behind, a soft weight neither of them would ever put down.