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necklace. She took a deep breath. “So Polly and I were talking and she said something about donor eggs, about using a donor egg to get pregnant.”
    â€œUh-huh,” John said.
    â€œSo you’d consider it?” Georgia said.
    â€œHmmm.”
    â€œBuffalo!” the computer chef said. “The pièce de résistance!”
    â€œCan you turn that down?” Georgia asked. “Really, it’s incredibly annoying to listen to that when I’m trying to talk to you.”
    John closed the laptop and set it down on his bedside table. “Okay,” he said. “Although now I’ll probably never make Chef Jamie’s buffalo meatballs.”
    â€œI’ll live,” Georgia said.
    â€œSo what were you saying?” he said. He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “God, does my head hurt.”
    Georgia’s heart fell. Maybe now wasn’t the best time to bring up Chessy’s eggs.
    John swung his legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and disappeared into the bathroom. She could hear him rummaging through the medicine cabinet, picking up pill bottles and shaking them.
    â€œWe have four, yes four , bottles of Advil here and they’re all empty,” he said. “That’s great. Shit.” Georgia heard more rattling, the sound of running water.
    He came back out, palms pressed against his temples. “I took aspirin,” he said. “I haven’t taken aspirin since 1986. Which is probably how old that bottle of aspirin is.”
    He climbed into bed, lay on his back, pulled the covers up to his chin, and closed his eyes. It was the oddest position to sleep in, Georgia thought. Yet he’d slept like that, laid out like a pine board, since she’d known him.
    â€œWhat did you want to talk about?” he said.
    â€œOh, never mind,” Georgia said. “We can talk about it some other time.”
    â€œGood,” he said. “I need to get some sleep.” He let out a long, deep sigh.
    Georgia dropped her necklace into the jewelry box on her dresser and reached up to pull an earring from one ear.
    â€œAt least I can sleep,” John murmured. “Remember all those years when Liza didn’t sleep through the night? That killed me. Thank God we’re done with that .”
    Georgia paused, her hand on her earlobe. “With what?”
    â€œBabies,” John said. “Screaming, crying, pooping, sleepless babies.” He yawned. “Good night.”

5
    Alice
    Two Months Earlier, April 2012
    A lice sat on a metal bench outside the Bender Library on a Monday afternoon, her briefcase on the concrete walkway beside her, a cup of coffee in her hand. The quad was filled with students giddy over the sunshine, the warm breeze, the impending freedom of summer. A boy in skinny jeans and a white T-shirt took off his black Converse sneakers, tied the laces together, and hurled them into a tree. Three girls in sundresses sat on the grass nearby, texting away on their phones. They looked up when they heard the whoosh! of the sneakers through the air, and one of the girls snapped a photo. Across the quad, a dog barked at a student who stood on a chair in front of the Mary Graydon building, wearing rainbow-striped parachute pants and no shirt.
    Alice closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun, feeling it warm her skin, the metal of the bench beside her, the concrete beneath her feet. Here she was at her beloved American University, in the middle of a spring semester in which she was teaching three of her favorite classes to some of the best students she’d ever had, with a letter from the dean in her briefcase commending a recent paper she’d published. The sun was shining after a month of rain; this week marked her fourteenth wedding anniversary; her daughter was thriving after all the upheaval in the fall—and yet Alice was so unhappy she envied the very buds