He then accepted a transfer to the New York office, and the gorgeous six-foot-tall blond associate Amelia James Renninger, a.k.a. AJ, went with him. They moved into a loft in SoHo together.

Even if it’s mine, it’s not mine. Ursula was, on the one hand, reassured by this blunt statement; she chose to believe that since Anders had categorically rejected paternity, the baby must be Jake’s. Still, she worried the baby would come out blond and oversize when both she and Jake were dark and slender. She feared bringing pictures of the baby to the office and watching everyone at the firm realize that Ursula’s baby looked exactly like Anders Jorgensen.

On January 23, 2001, Elizabeth Brenneman McCloud was born, weighing six pounds, eleven ounces, and measuring nineteen inches. Dark hair, dark eyes, something in her face that echoed Jake’s.

God is good, Ursula thought. Though she knew there would be payback somewhere down the road.

After Bess was born, Ursula hired a baby nurse who slept on a cot in the second bedroom, now the nursery, but Ursula got up for every single feeding. She expressed milk nonstop, labeled the bags, stockpiled them in the freezer. She returned to work after only four weeks. She traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, for a case but flew home every weekend, sleep be damned. She interviewed nannies and found Prue—sixty years old, Irish, the mother of four grown children herself. Prue takes excellent care of Bess, and Ursula watches Prue’s every move, hoping to imitate her calm, sure hands, her ability to be present with the baby, never distracted, never rushed.

I can guarantee you one thing, Prue says. These are days you’ll miss.

Ursula is doing it all, and for months, she’s been doing it all well. She has a thousand billable hours by the end of June. After Omaha, she takes a case in Bentonville, Arkansas. Isn’t there anything closer? Jake asks. He’s helpful, hands-on, every bit as smitten with Bess as Ursula is if not more so—Ursula caught him dancing with her in the nursery to the strains of Baby Mozart—but he has just started as the VP of development for the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation and he travels across the country to meet with donors. Ursula’s third case of the year is in Washington proper, so she’s able to feed Bess every night and every morning. When summer rolls around and Bess starts eating solids, Ursula goes to the Orchard Country Farm Stand and buys produce to steam, purée, and strain. Jake is impressed; Ursula has never cooked anything in her life.

Bess meets all of her developmental milestones early. She rolls over, sits up, smiles, laughs, coos. She has soft brown hair coming in and large, chocolaty eyes. She has Jake’s smile. What a smile. Ursula has never melted at anything in her life—but that smile.

Jake goes to Nantucket over Labor Day and Prue is away visiting her daughter on Lake Lure so Ursula has Bess to herself for the weekend. She is…the perfect mother! The perfect working mother! She nurses Bess, feeds her, changes her, takes her to the park and pushes her a hundred and fifty times in the bucket swing, reads to her, puts her down for her nap. While Bess is napping, Ursula works, and when she takes a break, she gets on the treadmill and powers out four miles. At the end of the day, she is too tired to even make a sandwich or call the Indian place a block away so she pours a glass of wine and eats an apple for dinner.

As soon as Jake returns from Nantucket, Ursula goes back to work, but it’s harder after such a wonderful weekend than it was even right after Bess was born. Ursula considers Hank Silver’s offer anew. What exactly does she want to achieve by making partner? Money? Prestige? An ego boost? Ursula always had some sense that she would change the world, make a difference—but she’s the first to admit this isn’t happening in the world of mergers and acquisitions.

The following weekend, Bess has a low-grade fever. She’s cranky and gnaws on her fist; she sneezes, her nose runs, her cries are ragged with mucus. Ursula gets home from work Monday evening and Prue announces that it’s not teething, like they all thought. Bess needs to see the pediatrician. Prue has made an appointment for nine o’clock the next morning.

No problem, Ursula will take her, go into the office late.

“Are you sure?” Jake says. “Prue can take her.”

“I am not the kind of mother who makes her nanny take her sick child to the doctor,” Ursula says.

Jake squeezes her shoulder. “I know you’re not,” he says. “I’m proud of you.” The words are meant to be kind, she knows—Jake is as kind a person as God ever created—but they also sound vaguely patronizing. He’s proud of her for choosing Bess over work because he expected the opposite. He’s proud of her, but he isn’t volunteering to take Bess, even though it was fine for him to take last Friday off so he could go to Nantucket on his boys’ weekend.

Ursula could start a fight, but she won’t because they will go around and around and say hurtful things they don’t mean and Ursula will still end up taking Bess to the doctor. She keeps quiet. She’s learning.

She’s smart enough to be the first parent at Dr. Wells’s office the next morning. Ursula doesn’t have a minute to waste—look in her ears, write a scrip, and we’re off. It’s five minutes to nine. The staff is milling about in the back, getting ready to start a day of caring for the children of Washington’s elite. Deena Dick, the receptionist at Dr. Wells’s office, is among the most powerful women in Washington, and she knows it.

Deena sees Ursula enter the waiting room five minutes early and she takes a sustaining breath. These parents. But better early than late, she supposes—her day will end with one of the ambassador wives rushing in at ten past five with her kid in tow, pedicure foam still between her toes. Priorities.

Deena stands up to call Ursula and baby Bess back; the doctor is perpetually late and won’t be here for another ten minutes at least, but they can get the baby weighed and check her vitals. Parents are less impatient once they cross the threshold to an examining room.

Then the emergency line rings.

Ugh, Deena thinks. She picks it up.

“Honey?”

It’s Deena’s husband, Wes.

“What’s wrong?” Deena asks. When Deena left the house that morning, Wes was dressed for work, making Braden and the twins French toast and watching the morning news.

“Something’s happened,” Wes says. “Turn on the TV.”

Deena is confused. A plane hit the World Trade Center? At first, she thinks it’s a small plane, an inexperienced pilot, a rogue gust of wind, maybe. Deena doesn’t have time to turn on the TV—okay, maybe she does, there’s a small one in their lunchroom. She finds CNN. Sure enough…wow, it looks bad. The building is on fire, and people are dead for certain. Deena says a prayer and goes to fetch Ursula and baby Bess.

Bess is on the scale; she weighs nearly fifteen pounds, the nurse, Kim, says. Kim sticks a thermometer in Bess’s ear. Temp is 99.3, so not even a fever. Has Ursula given her any Tylenol drops this morning?

Ursula is distracted by the buzzing of her cell phone in her purse. It must be work. The case in Washington is complicated, with lots of red tape and political ramifications—imagine that. “No,” Ursula says.

Kim eyes Ursula’s bag distastefully. “The doctor will be in shortly.”