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"I'm not going," Gemma tells him, because today is Tuesday, the fourth day of February, which means that in exactly five days she's meant to take a pregnancy test—and while she has no idea which way it will go, no idea what she's even hoping for at this point, she does know that she'd rather not be in North Dakota when she finds out. She shakes her head. "This is so typical. You can't disappear for three years and then out of nowhere just . . ." She trails off, her throat suddenly thick, and blinks a few times. "I'm not going. I can't."

Mateo frowns. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," she says firmly.

"Okay," he says, and then he brightens. "You've got plans this weekend anyway."

"I do?"

"Yeah, it's only the biggest event of the sixth-grade academic calendar."

"Right," she says with a faint smile. "The science fair."

He runs a hand along his rapidly balding head. "We've got to see whether Beatrice W's potato ends up with more hair than I have at this point."

Gemma walks over and kisses him lightly on the cheek. "It might, but you'll still be cuter," she says, and he grins. "I'm gonna run out for some milk."

Mateo opens the fridge and points inside. "We have plenty."

"Then I'm going for a walk," she says, already disappearing into their bedroom to get dressed.

Outside, it's unseasonably warm for February in Chicago, even at this early hour. The air still smells of rain from last night's storm, and in the distance, the sunrise is reflected in the flashing silver of the skyline. Gemma feels a deep fondness for all of it: the elevated train rumbling by, the old woman watering her plants on the steps of a neighboring brownstone, the line out the door of the fancy coffee place on the corner. All those years growing up in the little A-frame house in Michigan, staring across the lake from the opposite shore, this is what she'd wished for: a city. A sense of freedom. A place where she, too, could disappear.

In the convenience store, Gemma weaves aimlessly through the aisles and arrives at the checkout with an armful of items she barely remembers grabbing. She spills them onto the counter and then hands over her credit card, which the blue-haired girl glances at before swiping.

"Endicott," she says, and Gemma follows her gaze to the magazine rack beside the cash register, unsurprised to find Jude looking back at her from the cover of 'People.' She's wearing a gold sequined dress, her strawberry-blond hair—the same color as Gemma's, the same as all of theirs—sleek in a long bob and the fair skin across her nose sprinkled with freckles. It's a special Oscars preview, and the headline across the front reads: golden girl.

"That's not you, is it?" the girl asks with a sardonic smile as she swipes Gemma's card. "Is this one of those stars-are-just-like-us moments?" Gemma is about to assure her it's not when the machine lets out a shrill beep, and the girl looks up again. "Oh. Um . . . it's been declined."

Behind her, a mom trying to pry a candy bar out of her toddler's hands averts her eyes, clearly embarrassed by this turn of events.

Gemma had forgotten they'd put the entire cost of the IVF on this card, which amounted to thousands and thousands of dollars and had raised a fraud alert they were still trying to untangle. 'See,' she'd almost said to Mateo, 'even the bank thinks it's unlikely that I'd be trying' 'to become a parent.'

"Now you know for sure I'm not a movie star," Gemma says as she fumbles through her wallet for cash, but then she realizes she doesn't really need any of this stuff. "You know what? I think I'm okay actually." She waves awkwardly as she backpedals out of the line, but even once she's outside, her words continue to ring in her ears: 'I think I'm' 'okay, I think I'm okay.'

She tips her head back to look at the sky, taking long, ragged breaths. She has a powerful urge to text Connor and Roddy and ask if they've heard from Jude as well, to see if there's some universe in which they're actually planning to go to North Dakota this weekend. But she doesn't. She's not sure if she's more afraid that they'll write back or that they won't.

'Three years,' she thinks. How could they have let so much time go by?

This isn't the first time their family has fractured. That happened when Frankie up and left them out of the blue, and then again years later on the night when Gemma and Connor and Roddy woke up in a Texas motel to the smell of smoke and stumbled outside to find Jude and Frankie huddled together on the grass, their faces pale behind streaks of ash, watching the old red Honda burn in the blueblack night. They'd apparently been sitting in the parked car when Frankie decided to light a joint. "It must've been a spark," she kept repeating afterward, her voice strangely robotic, her eyes a little haunted. It didn't occur to Gemma to ask why their mother thought it would be a good idea to smoke pot in an enclosed space during a heart-to-heart with her fourteen-year-old daughter; Frankie had been largely absent from their lives for years at that point, and Gemma had long since stopped asking those types of questions.