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She heard the click and pop of phone lines crossing.

As she waited, she thought of her psychology professor, Dr. Birnbaum, with his yellow hair and rosacea-prone cheeks, telling the class, “People hurt themselves continually by believing in false hope, by believing these false narratives about people in their lives.” It nearly made her hang up, but then she heard the perky voice of a Dartmouth College switchboard operator come on the line, and Betsy, clearing her throat, pressed her feet into the linoleum flooring of the three-by-three booth.

She asked to be connected to Dr. Andy Pines in the Department of Psychology.

Quiet static crackled along the lines, her mouth going dry as soon as a second phone trilled. She inserted three additional dimes.

Twisting at the metal phone cord, Betsy heard an elderly voice answer with a friendly greeting. “Dartmouth Psychology. May I help you?”

Betsy tasted the strawberry ChapStick on her lips, hesitating, and the woman barked into the receiver, “Hello?”

“Hi,” Betsy said. She launched into a long-winded explanation of how she was an old friend of Dr. Andy Pines from Columbia, and did he have a moment to speak with her?

There was the shuffle of papers, the thud of the mouthpiece being set down on a desk.

Voices chatting in the background. Then, finally, footsteps.

“Hello?” The baritone of his voice, the friendly tone.

Did Andy not have a phone in his office?

She thought this conversation would be more private, but now she imagined him receiving the information while standing under the fluorescent lights of a department office, the ubiquitous filing cabinets and photocopy machine nearby, the rhythmic click of a stapler irritating him more than it needed to.

“Hello, Andy,” she said, trying to sound friendly, worming her finger into the change dispenser. “It’s me. Betsy.”

Andy was the quiet type, a man that squinted when he listened closely, that pressed his thin lips closed as he hunted for a thoughtful response. This time, though, he responded like a game show host. “Betsy? Betsy from Columbia?”

She curled her toes in her swampy sneakers. I’ll give up sailing. I’ll give up this island. This house of my family’s. Just let this go all right.

“Yes, it’s Betsy from Columbia. I saw you a few weeks ago. In your office.” You failed me. In more ways than you know.

“Ha, just checking to make sure,” he said. It was his public voice, the voice he used when he stood at the front of the class and tried to win his students over with his sparkling personality. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

So soon. The words were like an anchor tossed overboard, the heavy weight sinking to the sea floor, slamming with a thud in the sand.

Betsy wiped her nose with the back of her wrist and sucked in one solid breath while feeding the phone with two more dimes. “Yes, well, I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

They made a few seconds of small talk about how beautiful the campus was, how he was working on a research project until classes began at the end of August. The rain picked up outside and the front door of the Town Hall opened.

A middle-aged man in a cap entered and shook out an umbrella.

Betsy turned her back to the stranger and pressed her forehead against the cool glass wall of the booth.

“I’m in the middle of something though, Betsy, so…”

“I’m pregnant.”

The line went quiet. They would be forced to have an adult conversation, to work out the details. It would be the first in a series of phone calls as they figured out what to do.

Andy cleared his throat. “Sorry, but that’s not possible.”

The muscles in her abdomen contracted. Her mind recalled how he’d unbuttoned her wool dress in her bedroom on that first night, how he’d kissed up her back like he couldn’t get enough of her. How they’d repeated the scene on several occasions. Yes, it was certainly possible.

The operator came on the line, reminding Betsy that every minute cost two dimes. She hurried in two more and hoped to God the operator wasn’t listening. “There’s been no one else, Andy.”

I thought maybe I could move up to New Hampshire and we could get an apartment and have this baby together. A baby, not a lima bean. A baby.

His voice was so formal it was pressed flat, steamrolling right over her. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be of much help. I don’t have a student by that name.”

She pressed a fist to her mouth, biting down hard on the fleshy part of her curved finger. Not only would he deny that he was involved, but he would also pretend that she’d meant nothing to him. The possibility garbled her voice, and her words oozed out of her like thick, muddy tar.

“There were no others. Not for years. It has only ever been you.”

The mouthpiece was muffled suddenly, and she heard him say, “Just one more minute, Milly.” Betsy put in two more dimes, realizing she didn’t have many left now.

He needed to get back on the line. Andy returned with his voice crystalline.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have any information to help.

For what you need, at least. I just arrived here, and I don’t have a student by that name. ”

She continued to talk right over him. “I’m not calling you for any money if that’s what you think. But I’m considering having this child, and it’s yours, and I would like you to be a part of its life. This child cannot be alone in this world…”

The trill of a dial tone roared into her ear. “I thought we might have this baby together.”

The last part she’d whispered as the line went dead, a piece of Betsy’s heart felt like it had been lobbed off.

Is that really what she wanted? To have this baby, all by herself.

Perhaps it was. The realization made her dizzy, and for a moment she felt like she might pass out cold.

She gripped the aluminum shelf of the booth and steadied her breathing.

What had she eaten that morning? An egg, a cup of black coffee.

Having a baby would give her purpose. She would be someone’s mother, and just like every woman before her, she’d be forced to figure out the complicated balance of raising a tiny human while caring for yourself.

But then there was graduate school. Classes. She couldn’t exactly waddle her way around campus.

A stranger knocked on the folding door, and Betsy jumped.

A middle-aged man in a suit pointed to a sign posted on the wall outside: C ALLS L IMITED TO 5 M INUTES , P LEASE.

Betsy placed the black plastic earpiece back on the receiver and opened the telephone booth, pushing past the grumpy bearded man and running out of the Town Hall and into the pouring rain.

She’d forgotten her umbrella, and she stepped in puddle after puddle as she made her way home.

At the house, she rushed inside the front door, kicking it shut and ducking out of the rain.

Betsy flicked on the living room light and tossed her workbag onto the coffee table. “Mom,” she yelled. “Aggie?”

There was no answer. She checked the driveway, but the car wasn’t there either. Go figure , she thought. She’d been waiting for one second alone in the living room all this week, and here it was at the very moment that she didn’t want to be alone.

Betsy grabbed a jar of peanut butter and a spoon and slumped across the cool cotton sheet her mother had draped over the couch so her granddaughter didn’t stain it with her sticky hands.

She stared up at the medallion light fixture and the myriad jagged cracks in the ceiling.

They would need to paint before they sold the house.

Perhaps she should add it to her to-do list, which included finding a goddamned place to live that doesn’t involve staying with your mother the rest of your life.

She curled into the chair, sobbing so hard while spooning peanut butter in her mouth that she didn’t even notice, until it was too late, that Louisa had come in the house lugging a suitcase.

Nor did Betsy notice straightaway that Louisa had been crying too; that her eyes had large red rings around them and she looked so exhausted that she might just collapse into a million little pieces right there on the living room rug.

Louisa raced up to the bedroom and slammed the door, while Betsy hurried into the upstairs bathroom.

She plugged the bathtub drain and ran herself a warm bath, lowering herself into the bubbles and hot water while listening to the wind whip at the tree branches outside.

She let herself cup her hand over her stomach.

It will be me and you , she told the baby . We won’t need anyone else at all, because I will take care of you and never make you choose between your parents.

There was satisfaction in her decision, but an ocean of shame too.

There was no good reason to have this baby other than the fact that she couldn’t bring herself to go to a clinic, and still, the idea of a baby in her arms, looking up at her with those giant eyes and smiling, made Betsy’s heart do a little flutter.

It would be her secret until she was ready to share it with Louisa, Aggie, or her mother.

The idea lifted a compressed feeling in her chest, but it returned immediately, the sight of her rounding belly popping into her head.

Betsy could only hide a pregnancy for so long.

Lifting herself out of the warm water, Betsy wrapped herself in a fluffy brown towel and sat on the toilet seat.

After dressing and brushing out her long straight hair, she discovered her sister was in their mother’s study, rain pattering the windows and a single standing lamp illuminating the room.

Louisa sat cross-legged on the floor with a series of folders around her.

“Are you okay, Louisa?” She stood in the doorway waiting for her sister to look at her, but Louisa kept her gaze trained on the files.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” The second hand on her mother’s desk clock ticked five seconds, then twenty.

Betsy was about to leave the room when her sister turned, her face puffy and red, and said, “I’m in for the book club though. Mom and I think we should read The Awakening by Kate Chopin first.”

There was no point in disagreeing. “Fine with me,” Betsy said, handing her sister a box of Kleenex off their mother’s desk.

Back in her bedroom, Betsy pulled her psychology book into her lap. She turned the pages, the theories slipping in and out of her jumbled thinking, and she remained there, hopeless and brooding and worrying about her sister, until night.