In spite of the rainy weather (or maybe because of it), Danielle found herself in the infant and toddler play space of the Boston Children's Museum. She'd never in her life been somewhere so God-awful full of screaming children, their jaded caregivers trailing them or sitting and chatting, ignoring their little ones as they caught up on gossip. Some part of her was slowly dying as she stood near a large glowing pegboard resembling a blown-up LiteBrite, complete with fat, neon plastic pegs to stick through its quarter-sized holes. Her six-week-old daughter slept in the sophisticated three-in-one age-adjustable stroller (technically referred to as a "travel system") before her. For the amount Danielle had spent to get into this place, her child was experiencing none of it! Exposure to educational and creative surroundings from a young age shaped a child's future—that was something she'd read in one of the many parenting books she'd consumed prior to birthing Evangeline. But the frustrating baby napped at the most inopportune times! Danielle had half a mind to wake her up.

But no—who was she kidding? Waking the baby would surely mean a feeding, and she was not going to spend half an hour looking for a lactation room while her daughter bawled. Besides, this trip was truthfully more for her than it was for Evangeline; she'd been desperate to get out of the house, and where was it socially acceptable to go with a potentially-screaming child except around other potentially-screaming children?

A child bumped into her leg, shoved around her to get to the pegboard. Danielle backed away and narrowed her eyes at the little boy, then pushed her stroller toward the sand-play area, where an empty bench appealed to her.

Sliding along the low wooden seating, Danielle wondered (not for the first time) why she'd done this to herself, why she'd so drastically changed her life. It'd all sounded like such a good idea prior to actually having the baby, but now that Evangeline was here and she had no support group, the woman had rapidly begun to question her choice. She was ashamed of herself every time she wished for the ease of her previous life, and yet the isolation was crushing. Having a baby had revealed to Danielle how few friends she actually had. In fact, the only person she'd spoken to beyond her mother (who'd been virtually useless) was Helen. And thinking of Helen pulled her in other directions, as well.

The sleepless nights and the baby's constant needs were draining, though at least she hadn't had any more hallucinations, not like that horrifying one she'd experienced a few weeks back, when she'd thought she'd left Evangeline on the counter. Thank God it hadn't been that bad again. She hadn't felt so mind-warped since she'd been in middle school, back when they'd played that game, when Emily had gone, after they'd messed with that . . . that thing, whatever it was . . .

The woman shook her head. That'd all been post-traumatic stress, coupled with social contagion; that's why all four of them had been—

No. She wasn't going down that damned rabbit hole, again. It'd happened too often, lately.

"Danielle? Danielle Maduro?"

Danielle could hardly hide her shock when she looked up to find a young, beautiful woman standing before her. She vaguely recognized the twenty-something, but the combination of mental fatigue and unfamiliar context conspired to repress the connection.

"Ava Shipley!" The woman graciously added, placing a hand against her chest and smiling amidst her frame of perfect golden waves. "I interned at your office last summer!"

The association clicked. "Oh, yes," Danielle forced herself to reply, though her anxiety was mounting. "I do remember you. You got me coffee every morning."

Rather than take offense at the intended condescension, the young woman laughed and slid onto the bench. "Two creams, one dash of cinnamon!"

Danielle tried to smile but her lips wouldn't part. Why had this woman sat down? They had literally nothing in common, and Ava's presence made her own slovenly attire and presentation that much more obvious.

"So you did it, then?" the woman asked.

"Did . . . what?"

Ava waved at the stroller. "The baby! You were going on about it when I was there, all about hitting up the sperm bank, getting the show on the road, you know?"

Embarrassed, Danielle gave a quick glance about the room but found no one likely to be listening. She turned the stroller away from her acquaintance's prying eyes. "And have you had a child, then?"

"Oh God, no!" Ava tilted back her head and shook her curls. "I'm not bringing a human into this terrible world." She bent conspiratorially toward Danielle. "It's my boyfriend's kid, his week for custody, you know. Not sure he's the one, though, coming with this kind of baggage." She sat back, entirely oblivious to her listener's lack of interest. "So when do you go back to work, then? Or do you?"

This was one of those women who delighted in oversharing, Danielle realized. She'd not known Ava except as someone on her periphery, someone else's subordinate. "I've taken six months."

"Six months? Holy shit! That's—that's forever! And they'll let you come back?"

Danielle caught sight of several adults looking their way, frowning at the loud swear, and she found she wanted nothing more than for this woman to leave. "You can do what you want when you're your own boss." She pinched her cheeks up into a travesty of a grin. "Maybe someday you'll get there, but I wouldn't count on it. Takes a certain level of . . . integrity. You understand."

Ava's open mouth, surely poised to offer more nonsense, quivered slightly, then shut. She rose, and Danielle envied her slender figure in its stylish fitted jeans and crop top before attempting to send her image and their conversation to her mental incinerator. But then the former intern unexpectedly snapped back, "There's no need to be a bitch; I was just trying to be nice. And by the way, you might want to take care of that," before spinning off to find the boyfriend she'd been evading. She'd pointed at Danielle's chest, whirled her finger, the attitude evident behind the gesture, and after a moment of bewilderment, Danielle looked down in sudden awareness to see she'd leaked through her gray T-shirt: two large, damp circles were expanding over each nipple. She knew, suddenly, she'd forgotten to wear nursing pads, and the pins-and-needles in her breasts told her the milk had just let down, though she hadn't needed more than the visual to tell her.

Mortified, Danielle turned into the sand-play alcove, away from everyone, sure they were laughing at her, mocking her. She'd not brought any extra clothing. What could she do? The bathroom—a hand dryer.

A hasty retreat and a few flustered requests for directions later (her infant's blanket held to her chest the while), Danielle was in a family restroom, door locked, shirt and bra off, dryer running while one hand held her clothing under it and the other pressed a moist paper towel to her swollen breasts.

She felt too old to cry, and yet the constant exhaustion and aggravation of the past six weeks had broken down so many internal boundaries she'd set for herself. She didn't deserve this! She'd done a good thing, hadn't she? Brought life into the world. Why was it so difficult? She'd thought she could handle anything—why, grown men had capitulated in the face of her demands, and here she was, weeping over embarrassing herself in front of some nothing former intern because of her soft, painful body's still-foreign workings. It was too hard, and she was losing it. She knew what her mother would say: stop breastfeeding! hire a nanny! But Danielle couldn't bring herself to admit such defeat. She'd promised her future child she'd offer only the best to it, and that meant eschewing that poisonous, nutrient-poor false food aptly called "formula" (as if she'd let anyone experiment on her offspring) and creating an intimate bond with her, which would be impossible with some stranger wandering about the apartment trying to "help." No, she'd push through. She could do this. She'd done so much, come so far, been through worse things than some others could imagine, and she'd done it all on her own! So she could do this, too, just as so many other women did.

Her clothes finally dry, Danielle put them back on, fishing some disposable breast pads out of her diaper bag and sticking them inside her bra. All was well. She straightened her hair, wiped away her smudged makeup, and pulled herself together before leaving the family restroom. Evangeline had miraculously slept through the whole noisy affair.

Had she not spent so much to come downtown to the museum and to get into it, Danielle would have left. As it was, she determined not to let one woman ruin her outing. If Evangeline did wake up, the infant might enjoy looking at some of the lights and hearing the sounds of the museum. It could all end up pleasant enough.

Rather than sit in one area, Danielle decided to wander, to make herself unavailable to any other people who might think she looked like someone interested in conversation. By two o'clock the museum had become quite crowded, and her tolerance neared its limit. She'd been wandering through the establishment's exhibits and abruptly found herself in a large space containing materials with which to build forts. The blanket and box forts of every child's imagination were winding and towering throughout the room, cropping up as groups of children and adults worked together to connect them. Danielle paused to watch the people at play, thought of the forts she'd built as a child, of the tents and tunnels she and Joanna and Helen and Emily had orchestrated in one another's basements over the years, the laughter and adventure and secrets they'd shared, and the hole they'd opened up years later, after Anjulie arrived with her weird family and her weirder ideas.

A little boy was suddenly at her side, a child of perhaps five, and he was staring into the stroller. Danielle couldn't help but feel proud in spite of her dislike of prying eyes and unhygienic proximity. "Her name's Evangeline," she offered.

The boy did not look at her when she spoke, instead continuing to stare intently into the stroller. "What's wrong with her?" He asked at length, poking a finger around and up into his nose.

The woman tried to ignore her interrogator's nose-picking. "She's just sleeping."

"Where's her face?"

Danielle was taken aback. Her thoughts recalibrated. "Wh-what?" A quick look at Evangeline told her the infant did indeed still have a face, though its eyes were unexpectedly open, now.

The boy said nothing else, but when Danielle glanced back at him with half a mind to give him her mind, she saw that he was staring now at her, the most uncanny, darkly familiar expression on his ugly pug-nosed face, and a cursory glance about the room revealed several other children paused in their activities or even continuing them, their faces turned to her, watching as if they knew something she didn't, as if they . . . they felt sorry for her!

Danielle's dream of nights ago trembled in her thoughts, and she barked at the little boy and at all the others, "It's rude to stare!" before making a beeline to the exit, paying no attention to the judgmental looks of the other grown people.