The gravity of what had happened that night didn’t present itself to Connie until over a month later-Labor Day weekend. She was back on Nantucket with Wolf, only this time his entire family was vacationing at the cottage, as was their tradition. The Flute family believed that the final weekend of summer was superior to all other weekends, and that the last family to leave Nantucket for the season won some kind of intangible prize. (The Flutes regularly stayed until the Tuesday or Wednesday after Labor Day. As a child, Wolf had consistently missed the first day of school, and he’d been two weeks late matriculating at Brown.) In the house that weekend was Wolf’s brother, Jake, Wolf’s parents, and Wolf’s grandparents. It was a weekend that included sailing and badminton, a lobster bake on Saturday, and lobster bisque made from the shells on Sunday. (It was a Yankee household; nothing went to waste.) The Flutes were athletic, hearty, seafaring people, but they weren’t drinkers. The only person to have a drink at dinner was Wolf’s grandmother, and that drink was a tiny glass of cream sherry. The rest of the family drank ice water or unsweetened iced tea, and Wolf and Connie complied. This being the case, Connie couldn’t fathom the reason for her queasy stomach or leaden exhaustion. And yet, as she faced the first incarnation of the lobster and then the second, she had raced to the cottage’s lone bathroom-which was no bigger than the bathroom on a ship and had to be shared among the seven of them-and vomited. The times when she wasn’t expected at the family table or on a boat or on the beach for some camp game, Connie flopped across her spinsterish single bed in the third-floor guest room originally designed for the governess or nanny, and slept the heavy, sweaty sleep of the dead.

Near the end of the weekend, she awoke to Wolf rubbing her back. “You’re sick,” Wolf said. “My mother heard you retching in the bathroom. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Connie buried her head under the feather pillow. She hadn’t said so because she didn’t want to ruin Wolf’s family vacation or bring light to her infirmities (the fact that Mrs. Flute had heard her “retching” mortified her). She hadn’t said so because, part of the time, she felt just fine. She hadn’t said so because somewhere inside her, the knowledge lurked: she wasn’t sick.

“I’m not sick,” she told Wolf.

“You’re not?” he said.

“I’m pregnant.”

Wolf didn’t react one way or another to this news, and Connie was glad. She couldn’t handle anger or despair, and she couldn’t handle joy. She thought nothing about the situation other than she had finally gotten what she deserved. She had been sleeping with boys since Matt Klein in eleventh grade, and she had never been assiduous about birth control. She had expected the boy-guy-man to be assiduous, and when she discovered they often weren’t, it was always during the height of passion and she sometimes-too many times-took her chances. It was amazing she hadn’t gotten pregnant before this.

When Wolf finally did speak-it took him so long that Connie had drifted off back to sleep-what he said was, “Wow. Okay. Wow.”

The word “wow” bothered her. Connie had no intention of keeping this baby. She was only twenty-two years old, Wolf five years older. Wolf had a job as an architect with a firm in D.C., and he had a small apartment in Dupont Circle, but Connie still lived at home with her parents. She had been renting an apartment in Villanova, but one of her roommate’s drunk boyfriends had punched a hole in the plaster and they lost the security deposit and Connie’s parents had insisted that she live at home and save money until she proved she was responsible enough to live on her own. She had been working as a waitress at Aronimink and had, in fact, waited on her own drunk parents and her own drunk parents’ drunk friends, a situation that Connie found humbling enough to bring her to tears. She couldn’t handle caring for her own apartment, and she could barely handle her menial job, so how was she supposed to handle having a baby?

“I didn’t want to have a baby,” Connie said to Dan now. “I was just a kid; I still had living to do, a lot of living. I wanted to travel to Europe the way Meredith had done; I wanted to be the maid of honor in Meredith’s wedding and look hot in my dress. I wanted to discover myself, live up to my potential. I had a degree from Villanova in sociology, and I wanted to prove the people wrong who said such a degree couldn’t be put to use. Whatever, I didn’t want a baby.”

“And your husband?”

“My boyfriend?” Connie said. “Yes, he decided he wanted a baby.”

Wolf had been as adamant about having the baby as Connie was adamant about not having the baby. He had been raised Protestant, but the first thing he did was to appeal to Connie’s Catholic faith. Hadn’t she been taught to believe in the sanctity of life? Yes, of course. But everyone made mistakes, and Connie had reconciled herself to the fact that this abortion was going to be her one grave mistake. She had her own accounting system as far as God was concerned, a system of checks and balances. She had lived cleanly up until that point-premarital sex aside-and she figured that even if she did commit this one mortal sin, she could dedicate the rest of her life to good works and still come out okay. She would get her MSW and become a social worker on the terrifying streets of North Philadelphia. She could fight homelessness and teen pregnancy.

Wolf said, “I’m not okay with you killing a living thing that God created.”

Connie couldn’t believe he was taking this kind of hard-line moral position.

“It’s an embryo,” she said.

“It will turn into a person,” Wolf said. “A boy or a girl. A man or a woman. Our child. Our first child, the next generation of my family… The future of the Flutes is right here.” He rested his hands on her abdomen.

She got it then. Wolf was under the intoxicating influence of the family weekend. He felt the pressure of his parents and his grandparents; he wanted to do his part in sustaining the dynasty, continuing the family line. Connie shook her head, looked away.

They didn’t do anything for a week, then another week. Connie returned to Villanova, to her job waiting tables at Aronimink, a job made harder by her condition. The smell of eggs-unavoidable at brunch-made her hurl, and she could no longer join the rest of the staff for late-night benders at the bar. Well, she could, she reasoned, since she wasn’t keeping the baby. But she didn’t.

She and Wolf talked every night on the phone. He said he loved her. He said he wanted to marry her.

“I knew if I had an abortion, I would lose Wolf,” Connie said. “And I didn’t want to lose Wolf. I was madly in love with him. I wanted to marry him. But I wanted to marry him properly, in good time, and I wanted to be married to him for a while before we had children. I made this argument, but the man would not be moved. He wanted the baby. He was so sure about it that I finally felt secure enough to agree. He promised me everything would be okay. He promised me everything would be better than okay.”

Connie and Wolf got married at Christmas in a small ceremony in Villanova. Meredith wore a red velvet cocktail dress and served as maid of honor. Freddy couldn’t attend because of a work thing. Toby showed up with a nineteen-year-old girl who had crewed on one of his boats, but there had been one song when Toby had danced with Meredith, and the girl-Connie had forgotten her name-had thrown herself at Wolf’s brother, Jake. Overall, however, the wedding was lovely. Connie wore a demure shade of ivory-according to Veronica, anything lighter would have been in poor taste-but what Connie remembered was looking longingly at the flutes of champagne, and longingly at Meredith’s twenty-four-inch waist, and wishing that she wasn’t pregnant.

Connie and Dan were sitting on the bottom step of the stairs of the public landing. They were still holding hands, and although Connie knew that it must be long past eight, Dan seemed in no hurry to get anywhere. This seemed like true luxury: being with someone who was content to listen. Connie suddenly believed that rehashing the past like this was going to lead her somewhere. But even if it didn’t lead her anywhere, it felt good.

“When the baby came, there were complications,” Connie said. “Ashlyn rotated during labor, her leg got stuck, I was howling in pain-though just like they all promise, I can only remember the howling, not the pain. At some point during this, my uterus ruptured, and I was rushed into surgery. When this kind of thing happened in the Middle Ages, the baby died and the mother died. But I was at Washington Hospital Center. They were good; they did a Cesarean, pulled Ashlyn out and stopped me from bleeding internally.”

“Jesus, Connie,” Dan said. He squeezed her hand, and Connie felt a rush of pure ecstasy, then chastised herself for using her most grisly story to get sympathetic attention. But it was true. It had happened; she had survived.

“I was convinced that the complication with the pregnancy was my punishment.”

“Punishment for what?” Dan said. “You didn’t terminate the pregnancy.”

“Punishment, I don’t know… for being me, maybe, for all of my transgressions. For wanting to terminate the pregnancy.”

“Oh, come on, you don’t believe that,” Dan said.

“I believed it at the time. Ashlyn and I have had a difficult relationship from the get-go. Since her birth. Since conception.”

Dan laughed. “You’re as insane as I am.”

“I know,” Connie said. But even when Connie and Ashlyn were getting along, Connie was always holding her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it always did: Ashlyn said something cutting, cruel, dismissive. If Ashlyn was unhappy, Connie was blamed, and Connie accepted the blame. She would always feel guilty about not wanting to have Ashlyn in the first place.