Stephen and I fought about children approximately twice a year, as if reproduction were a volcano that erupted every now and then on the island we’d created for ourselves. Once, I actually wore him down. ‘All right,’ he’d said. ‘If it happens, it happens.’ I threw away my birth control pills for six consecutive months, but we didn’t manage to make a baby. It took me nearly half a year after that to understand why not: You can’t create life in a place that’s dying by degrees.
