Natalie thought about it honestly, for the first time in years: she went through the rooms of her life one by one, opening doors. She thought about the stretch of months after the visit in Baker, when she had drunk too much, alone, in her apartment in Fort Collins, until a coworker at the restaurant had found her crying in the walk-in cooler and driven her to a counselor at the student health center. She thought about the counselor, a soft-spoken man with a gray ponytail whom she had seen eleven times and then stopped seeing because he kept asking about the baby. She thought about the two letters from Josh Kettering, which she had kept for six years in a shoebox and then burned in a coffee can on the patio of her first apartment. She told Adam all of it. It took a long time. The sun came up behind the houses across the street, and the sprinklers came on in the yard next door, and somewhere upstairs Emma's alarm began to beep and was silenced.
"That's everything," she said finally. "I swear to you. That's all of it."
Adam nodded slowly. He looked very tired.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
"Are you—" She could not say it.
"I don't know what I am," he said. "I'm not leaving. I told you that. I'm not going to leave Emma, and I'm not going to leave you. Not over this. But I don't know how long it's going to take before I can look at you and not see that nurse with the clipboard. It might be a while. I need you to be okay with it being a while."