“They need me, Mother,” Blair says. “Just let me do this.”

Everyone loves the babies! Kate, David, Jessie, even Exalta. Kirby ends up being the most helpful of all. She’s a natural with the babies, and she always remembers to bring Blair a tall glass of ice water and a cold bottle of beer before each feeding time. Blair gets desperately thirsty the instant the twins latch on, and beer is supposed to increase a mother’s milk supply. This might be just an old wives’ tale, but Blair doesn’t want to find out. The beer always lightens her mood.

Kirby isn’t put off by the zeppelins that Blair’s breasts have become, and she offers words of encouragement, calling Blair “Mama.” As soon as one twin is done feeding, Kirby takes him or her to the rocker until she gets a burp.

“Just so you know,” Kirby says, “I’m singing protest songs in their ears.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Blair says.

It’s also Kirby who brings her, finally, a second telegram from Angus.

FLYING BACK TOMORROW. WILL ARRIVE NANTUCKET SATURDAY AT NOON.

“Angus is coming to Nantucket,” Blair says. “Saturday.” Suddenly, she feels faint. “What am I going to do?”

“You’re going to talk,” Kirby says. “And you are going to stand up for yourself. You’re a wonderful mother but you have many other talents that will go to waste if you don’t use them. Angus needs to acknowledge that.”

“Okay?” Blair says.

“Tell you what,” Kirby says. “If you think you can handle the babies by yourself for a little while, I’ll get everyone out of here on Saturday. I’ll plan a boat outing so that you and Angus can have some time alone.”

“Thank you,” Blair says. She decides not to tell Kate or Exalta that Angus is coming—in case he doesn’t stay.

On Saturday, Kirby does exactly as she’s promised and gets the whole family—including David, who is back again this weekend—to head out to Coatue in the Whaler. Kate hesitates to go, not wanting to leave Blair alone, but Blair insists she’ll be fine. She’ll need to learn to take care of her own children without help sooner or later.

As soon as they all troop off toward the Field and Oar Club carrying the life preservers and a picnic basket, Blair feeds and burps the babies one by one, and they barely fuss at all. Both of them look at Blair with round, watchful eyes, as though they know something important is about to happen.

“That’s right,” Blair says. “You’re going to meet your father today.” She tears up—her emotions have been unmanageable since she gave birth—and she realizes her biggest fear isn’t that Angus doesn’t want her but that he doesn’t want the babies. He was the one who got her pregnant and in so doing quashed her hopes of pursuing a graduate degree, and he was the one who had the gall to conduct an affair. His behavior has been unforgivable and yet Blair wants, very badly, to forgive him. She is in love with these children, and only eight days after they arrived, she can’t imagine life without them.

But they need a father.

And—forget Betty Friedan!—Blair would like her husband back.

As soon as the twins fall asleep, Blair takes a long, hot shower inside, which would never be allowed if Exalta were home, and then combs out her hair and puts on a new dress, light blue gingham, maternity but still flattering. She applies makeup and perfume and puts in pearl earrings. Then she smokes a cigarette out in the backyard, and she waits.

At ten minutes past twelve, Blair hears a car pull up out front. She hears a door slam.

She hurries into the house but waits at the end of the hall until there’s a knock. Then slowly, slowly, she makes her way toward the front door.

Blair opens the door to find…her husband?

“Blair!” Angus says.

He looks…different. He hasn’t shaved in weeks; he has a beard, and his hair has grown out so much it’s nearly shaggy. With his glasses, he looks like John Lennon or Abbie Hoffman, a revolutionary. And he’s wearing jeans—Blair tries to remember if she has ever seen Angus in jeans—and a gray T-shirt that says MIT on the front in green letters. On his feet are a pair of Jesus sandals. It’s almost as if Angus hasn’t been at Mission Control at all but hanging out in Haight-Ashbury with Jefferson Airplane.

And yet this new look—groovy and relaxed—gives Blair hope. Maybe Angus has changed. If he’d shown up here in his suit with his hair short, Blair could only predict that things between them would have remained the same—which is to say, unsatisfactory.

Or, Blair thinks, maybe this new look is Trixie’s influence. Maybe Trixie is one of these women who don’t shave their legs or wash their hair; maybe she’s into circle-drumming and experimenting with LSD.

Blair holds the door open. “Come in.”

As Angus walks past her into the hallway, she sniffs at his clothes to see if she smells marijuana.

No, thank goodness.

Blair closes the door, then turns to face her husband, a man who stole her away from his brother with the mere mention of Edith Wharton. Blair considers asking him to sit in the formal living room or back to the kitchen for coffee or a beer, but she doesn’t want him getting too comfortable.

She remains planted in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs, where she can hear the babies if they cry.

“Tell me about Trixie,” Blair says. “The truth.”

“Dr. Cushion introduced me to her,” Angus says.

Dr. Cushion! Blair thinks. The famous professor emeritus of microbiology at MIT who hosted the ill-fated faculty potluck? Blair had suspected the “men in the den” weren’t talking only about science. They were also talking about women. Leonard Cushion mentored Angus in the art of finding a mistress!

“Dr. Beatrix Scofield,” Angus says. “She’s an esteemed psychoanalyst. She holds a doctorate from Johns Hopkins and an endowed chair at MIT.”

“I don’t need her CV,” Blair says. “I just want to know if you’re in love with her.”

“She’s not my mistress, Blair. She’s treating me as a patient. My episodes? They’re due to clinical depression. I’ve been working with Trixie—Dr. Scofield—and we’re having some success.”

Blair is confused, but she feels a lightening across her shoulders. “She’s a psychoanalyst? Like Freud? Do you lie on her couch?”