Rocky recalls a summer on the Cape when Jamie was six and Willa nearly three. In the loft bed beside their sleeping children, Nick gently suggested they try again for another baby, a year after Rocky's miscarriage.

Rocky describes the brutal cycle of trying to conceive: the hopeful climb toward ovulation and testing, followed by the crushing descent of negative results and bleeding. She felt hormonally driven toward wanting more children even as she questioned whether she truly wanted a third, comparing herself to friends enduring IVF and to her cousin whose pregnancy ended in cancer and hysterectomy.

She remembers obsessively taking pregnancy tests, including in Target bathrooms with her young children crammed into the stall, hallucinating faint second lines and feeling consumed by longing in a way that distracted her from the children she already had. She names this state a layer cake of grief, guilt, and shame.

That night on the Cape, Rocky told Nick she couldn't keep trying, and they stopped. But the grief, she reflects, remained with her always—like a heavy locket she never removed.