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Shields?”
    “What does she have to do with anything?”
    Sarah dove into teacher explanation mode, something she relished in, which is why she was such a natural mother herself. “Brooke wrote this book,” she began, as if she and the Suddenly Susan star were old friends. “It was all about her own postpartum depression. It was fascinating. She almost drove herself — and her baby — into a concrete wall! I’m telling you, she had bats in the belfry.”
    When it was just us, Jesse referred to Sarah as “Sayings Sarah” because she peppered nearly every conversation with little idioms and phrases. Amazingly, I’d never noticed before Jesse pointed it out. But he was exactly right.
    “Jesus.” I bit my lower lip.
    “I know! But the point is, just exactly like Margot, Brooke had wanted that baby. She’d gone through multiple rounds of IVF, the whole shebang.”
    “Wow.” I wound my way around the Great Lawn, grateful to have Sarah’s wise company during this run.
    “I saw her on Oprah,” she continued. “The way she described it was horrible. The gnawing doubt, the fear of never bonding, the lethargy, the hopelessness. It was subtle but insipid. Like death by a thousand paper cuts.”
    “So what do I do? What helped Brooke?” I asked, as if I, too, were on a first-name basis with her.
    “Meds. She needs meds. It’s a bummer, especially if she wants to breastfeed. But she needs a pharmaceutical jolt to knock her out of this. Then lots of therapy. Lots. The guilt…”
    “Jean, her mom, says Margot’s milk, um, dried up or whatever because she’s hardly eating. So she’s not breastfeeding anymore.”
    “Okay, so in a way that’s good because she can get on some powerful meds. So first up, get her a therapist, not just a psychologist — one who can prescribe.”
    I wondered how I could accomplish that Herculean administrative task by Sunday. I’d always loved that Margot was an only child like me because I didn’t have to compete with sisters for her affection. But for the first time, I wished that she had a sibling who could help get her better. “What about the baby?” I asked, shoving sweaty curls that escaped my ponytail back behind my ears.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Jean can’t take care of the baby anymore. She’s aged so much. It’s horrible. She shakes all the time. I was worried she’d drop the baby.” I fought to keep my posture from collapsing. “It was just…bad. And she’s a widow. There’s no one else.”
    “Jeez. Sounds like it. For now, giving Margot space from that baby will probably be helpful — and not bad experience for you.” Sarah was always trying to convince me that despite what I’d always believed about myself, I would be a good mother. She swore that if Jesse and I agreed to have a baby, she’d get pregnant with her third kid just so we could share the experience. I’d told her to go ahead and donate her crib and baby clothes because it wasn’t happening. “How long can you babysit in New York?”
    “Flying home Sunday night,” I said, turning a corner near the Loeb Boathouse and heading back towards my hotel. “How long did it take Brooke to recover?”
    “Hill,” she said, “you don’t want to know.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Showered and changed and back on West End Avenue, I nodded at Margot’s doorman, who once again led me to the elevators without calling upstairs first. He seemed to sense that my presence signaled an urgent situation. Or maybe he’d even witnessed it himself the last couple of months.
    In the elevator, I tried to ignore the throbbing hormone-induced headache and engage in some self talk. It was a technique I’d learned from race training. The messages were jumbled — a mixture of “You can do this” and “It’s not that bad”— and actually resembled the pep talks I gave myself before grueling hill repeats on rainy Sunday mornings. I blew out a deep breath as the doors opened on Margot’s floor.
    I tapped at the