Never did I think I would live all the way up here, far from the center of the city. Our house—and it is an entire house, not an apartment—has three floors and lots of windows. Windows so enormous that they frightened me at first.
   Nil promised that I would grow used to them. When we toured the place, he explained the importance of the southern exposure—all that light flooding in—and that the kitchen had been carefully built at a certain angle so that the neighbors couldn’t see us having breakfast in the mornings. Yet all that glass made me nervous. I feared running through it in a fit of rage.
   Or, later, the children getting hurt.
   For many, many years, I didn’t have children. I lived so much life. Changed countries, men, jobs. At thirty-five, I could have died happy, having lived much more joy and rapture than most people ever dream of. My hesitation regarding children involved a fear of not being able to explain all that life to another person, not being able to bridge that gap of time. So, for many years, I didn’t have children and then suddenly I had them very quickly. The speed of it all and how definitive it was is still shocking to me.
   Ada was born first. I was thirty-eight, which sounds ancient, but at the time I was vibrant, much younger than I had felt at twenty-nine or thirty. When she was born, we still lived in the city, and Nil and I were very much in love and equal in many ways, still living within the same emotional stratosphere. We worked hard, had interesting careers with potential, places to go in the world. We had known each other for two years, which is nothing compared to the thirty-six I had lived before meeting him but felt solid enough.
   At first, even intimately, things had gone slowly between the two of us, then suddenly they accelerated extraordinarily quickly. Full-on middle adulthood arrived like a high-speed train.
   By the time the twins were born, we had already moved up to this house, a modern masterpiece in concrete and glass. Nil loved Marc and Oliver more than I ever could have imagined. He loved Ada too of course, but he was overjoyed with the boys. Never had I imagined that what my husband wanted most out of life was sons.
   I won’t bore you with the daily dramas of motherhood or drone on about how much harder it is to be the woman. Frankly, I don’t have any complaints in that department. Eat sensibly, nurse the children, and the weight will slip away. My body changed, but it was going to change anyhow.
   My husband woke up as often as I did those years of sleepless nights. The difference between us comes from our backgrounds more than our gender. I am not used to wealth or luxury and have always, ever since arriving to Spain at twenty-one, been waiting for the other shoe to drop, to lose everything—job, partner, house, children—and be whisked away, sent back to the provincial American city of my youth. Nil, on the other hand, enjoys his privileges. He was born into this world of the Catalan upper classes so, when his career flourished, it seemed only a natural progression, totally expected.
   He is outside parking the Volvo now. It’s not an easy street on which to parallel park and we, thank heavens, do not have a garage. We haven’t reached that level of barbarity yet. The car is practical, he insists. And it is. Especially because we live up in the hilly outskirts of the city and drive to the mountains many weekends. Safe, practical for speeding up the autopista with three small children strapped in the back. But the car, its cushiness and smooth ride, just like the apartment in the rustic village in the mountains, always feels foreign to me, a prop from the lives of others. Some mornings in the mountain town I look in the mirror, shocked at how thin I am, at how well my hair is highlighted blonde. We always meet friends in the town for lunch. The children run wild while we discuss politics or real estate. I stick to one glass of wine at those lunches, terrified that something will shift, that somehow one day I will be found out for the out-of-control, undisciplined woman that I am.
   It’s still early, just ten, on Sunday. Nil, just back from his run, says, “I’ll take the kids to my sister’s. Stay. Work if you want.” He even offers to take the dog.
   It is, of course, an incredible gift. A whole chunk of freedom, not having to go to lunch at my sister-in-law’s or look after children. I assume Ada will ask to stay with me. It’s not that she’s particularly clingy, but she gets bored with her male cousins.
   But no, by some weird stroke of luck, she’s eager to go.
   “We’ll text you, Mom.”
   I dress, not in the casual Sunday clothes I would have worn to lunch, but in a black knit dress and suede ankle boots. Often I complain to Nil that with the children I have no time to work at home or even to read, but today I don’t want to concentrate. I slip out of the house as if I’m going to a meeting, pull on my camel hair coat and wrap a burgundy scarf around my neck, taking my small leather handbag. I’ll walk down into the center of Barcelona, I decide. It’s March. The sun is bright, but there is a strong, cold wind.
   Years ago, I used to walk every weekend. I hiked all through this small country with my first husband. Now I walk down past a few other mid-century houses, then past the old estates turned into nursing homes or private doctor offices, past the sprawling private school campuses, an outsider once again, taking this world in. Usually I ride my motorbike down to the subway or rush down on foot with the children. I feel uneasy and unsteady without anyone holding my hand or the pressure of an appointment, without even the urgency of Gertrude tugging on the lead.
   I don’t think about Nil or the children or work but rather about my first husband, Guillem, and all the times we walked past these places. Back then we would walk down from the mountains and re-enter Barcelona through this area, in awe that people actually lived here. It felt like a different world, light years away from our tiny apartment in the Raval that was close to the heart of the Gothic Quarter and the port. Have I not walked aimlessly since I was with Guillem? Perhaps not; there has always been a rush, a purpose. Nil and I got together already driven, mid-career, mid-life, full of ambition and forward motion. With Guillem, we wandered more, explored together, hiked through the countryside for days. Ten years since we separated, and Guillem is still my foundation, my roots in this part of the world.
   I’m already at the Plaza John Kennedy. There are no longer individual houses or winding streets but boulevards and 1970s apartment blocks that seem almost retro now with their swimming pools and doormen. Here there is a proper subway station with a direct line to the city center, but I continue walking down Balmes.
   Dr. Ricart lives on a busy corner of Balmes and Vía Augusta. When he took me under his wing over twenty years ago, he had just moved into the apartment. In between patients, he told me about the place: an entire room of fifty square meters dedicated only to books, an “American” kitchen, a solarium on the roof. It was the home he had made with his third wife, who, when I met her, seemed startlingly young—thirty-five—to be married to a doctor in his fifties. Now Lídia is softer in body and spirit but still has bright-blue eyes and delicate dimples. I spot her first, at the kiosk, buying the Sunday papers. The doctor is sitting, waiting at a nearby terrace. His hair is bright white but just as thick and wavy as the day we met.
   When he greets me, he cups my face in his hands, a gesture which in our darker periods incensed me but now feels comforting. In fact, I do the same thing some days to younger doctors or staff. It is a paternal gesture, possessive but tender. Dr Ricart is looking tired today. He retired five years ago and women still call our office to explain that they wanted him to deliver their baby but have decided to settle for me.
   “Elna, you’ve escaped from your husband and children,” he says.
I am thrilled that he knows me so well.
   Jaume Ricart was not an easy man to have as a mentor but I am certainly glad that I did. He belittled and humiliated me for ten years on an almost daily basis but made me into a very good doctor. He taught me to stand up straight, to look men in the eye and also to be thorough in my work. He was unrelenting. According to Jaume, any use of forceps was a failure on the part of the obstetrician, one’s own personal fuck-up. He reminded me of that on three brutal occasions.
   I linger a bit at his neck when we give our two kisses goodbye. He is old now, defanged. Lídia promises that they will invite Nil and me over for lunch.
   “We have to see the twins,” she insists.
   We hardly notice her, the doctor and me. He took me to lunch once when I was distraught over having left Guillem. That is probably one of the few times we ever shared a meal. He sat patiently opposite me and insisted that I finish a plate of rice. Later, he urged me to move in with Nil, to jump headlong.
   Nil’s sister, my sister-in-law, lives very close to Dr Ricart’s and I feel a bit guilty passing by her building, thinking of my husband and children up in the enormous apartment, devouring olives and potato chips and Fanta Naranja while Montse prepares lunch. It isn’t that I don’t like Montse; I do. But I envy her straightforwardness, her lack of mystery, or what I could call manners. She is beautiful, from a rich family and married to an even richer man. She cares about looking good and having a great apartment, about the children’s private schools and how well they speak English. It seems shallow to me to admit to such things and deathly boring to talk about them. My children love Montse and Montse’s house, which has comfortable sofas and a big flat-screen TV. It is set up for children and happiness. There is no doubt, no hesitation there.
   My office is nearby as well. The address is prestigious, so the rent is expensive, but I can’t complain. Our practice is well-regarded; I’m good at what I do. All day long I reassure women about their choices, pat upper-middle class women on the back and promise that everything is going to turn out fine. And, most of the time, it does. Money and a strong sense of entitlement often do get you exactly what you want.
   A woman called Laia came in last week, her face round and a cheerful, healthy white.
   “I worry,” she said as she slipped her shoes back on, “that I won’t be a good mother. But I know that my husband will be such a good dad. I might feel a bit left out.”
   Usually I lie to people, make things sound easier than they really are, but this woman seemed self-aware and intelligent, so I just told her, “It might feel like that. But that will be okay.”
   She had the baby yesterday. Albert, my colleague, did an emergency C-section. He was on call; we had agreed to do things this way. I went to the hospital a few hours later and Laia was shattered, much more distraught than the would-be-perfect dad, her healthy white face gone sallow.
   I didn’t like the look of the father much myself. And it bothered me, still does, as I’m walking past the office, that my impression of Laia was so wrong. She wasn’t as smart as she had seemed and her choice in husband showed it. He was handsome but without substance and wouldn’t make a good father at all. He couldn’t look me in the eye or thank me for having come to the hospital. He seemed tired and bored by his wife’s grief, burdened by the weariness in her face. He pointed to the baby as if it had nothing to do with him.
   “Gerard,” he said, without any sentiment, when I asked the name. I wanted mostly to shake him or at least to tell him to take care of his wife, but instead I shook his limp hand and left.
   Perhaps I sound like a harsh judge, and you will tell me that a good man is hard to find, but I’ve found plenty of them. That is something I want to make clear, that I’ve been very, very lucky in that regard.
   Montse’s husband travels a lot for work. He always has—to Brazil and Colombia and Venezuela. It wasn’t easy when her boys were tiny. She has told me that a few times when she’s had more than one glass of wine in the mountain town. Even though she has family close by, she was often alone with a toddler and a baby. Trapped in that apartment, waiting for José’s flight to land.
   That was some ten years ago, before we knew each other. I certainly wasn’t waiting for anyone back then. I was sleeping with a man who traveled a lot for work too, but we travelled together. His wife, a doctor like me, had just had the second kid and waited for him at home.
   I was living alone then, not far from my office. Those months after my divorce were a happy, if unstable period. I ate take-out sushi for dinner and smoked cigarettes on the balcony. The flat was small and unrenovated, but I didn’t mind. Actually, I embraced its shoddiness: the dusty wooden blinds and the cracked tile floors. The smell of damp and the chipped paint made me feel young, as if I were truly starting over. It was impossible to sleep at night because of the street noise below and I went to work exhausted, ate Hobnobs digestive biscuits and drank mad amounts of coffee in order to make it through each day. Women waddled into the office and complained unrelentingly about the heat and their swollen feet, and I went home each afternoon so happy to be thin and childless. I felt evil and unstoppable.
   That summer, our receptionist gave me Gertrude. In retrospect, she must have noticed that I needed to settle back down to earth. I used to walk by Nil’s firm with the dog. He invited me for coffee one evening, which turned into drinks, and over the next several months we went out every single Saturday. My friends called him Mr. Saturday Night.
   I had weekdays and most of Sunday to myself. I never imagined that we would be anything serious. Then suddenly, from somewhere deep down in my gut, I wanted more, so I demanded it. One Tuesday, I took him to lunch and said, “I want so much more.”
   He looked like he was going to throw up. Then he said, “But I do too.”
   I left my shoddy apartment and moved in with Nil. I softened a bit, cared about cooking dinner and buying diningroom chairs, became domestic and docile for the first time in my life.
   Sometimes I wonder how many of my patients have slept with married men, have been to a hotel with rooms rented by the hour, but most women don’t share that much with their ob-gyn. The mechanics of childbirth don’t give way to any sort of true emotional intimacy. It is a universal experience; it doesn’t lead to singular confessions. Some may share gory details, but pregnant women don’t explain moral trespasses.
   Nil traveled a lot for work then. Fortunately, he didn’t have to go far. He never had to do new stadiums in Brazil or high-rises in Dubai like so many of his peers. Being lucky in many ways, Nil also had success with small but well-paid projects in Europe: a library in a small city in Belgium, a private home built into a hillside in the Basque region of France, a university building in Lausanne, a tasteful parking garage in Montpellier. All on a human scale, in harmony with the landscape. Sometimes I would meet him on the weekends in the provincial but beautiful places where he was working. I’d drive to Montpellier with Gertrude and enjoy being the “wife”—nameless, jobless, simply a companion.
   We had sex every single day we were together. Strange that I remember that or feel the need to emphasize it, but somehow it matters to me. How easy it all was. More intense than I had ever experienced before and just so much simpler. We fit together somehow, each of us at our desks working until we were hungry enough to think about dinner. There was a convergence, a way that our propulsions collided and multiplied in those early days. We married on a Friday morning in the Barcelona City Hall and then both went back to work, but it felt perfect, as if we were connected, buzzing, taking on the world.
   Now, of course, he has drifted. Perhaps I have as well, back to some core self, filled with memory. When I was married to Guillem, for years as I was falling asleep, really on the edge of sleep, when you get that heavy-head, sinking-into-the-mattress feeling, I often pictured my mother alone in her part of the world, in the house where I grew up, also falling asleep. Her tired face nestled into the pillow seemed insurmountably sad to me, me being so far away. With my second marriage, that sinking feeling shifted. Now, when Nil falls asleep, I stare into the dark and find it shocking that Guillem is no longer next to me, that our lives have diverged.
   “It was good of you to go,” Nil told me, when I got back from visiting Laia and her no-good husband.
   Honestly, it wasn’t so hard for me; it took no sacrifice on my part. After seeing the baby, I sat by myself in the courtyard of the clinic for a bit. It’s beautiful, lined with orange trees, austere and clean and quiet. I just sat and thought about how I liked these relatively easy cases, comforting patients through the minor catastrophes: the woman set on a natural birth who gets C-sectioned, the first-semester miscarriages. Nothing too tragic, just the small letdowns that collect in women’s lives like tidal pools.

Rambla Catalunya is packed with Catalan families, three generations many of them, walking to Sunday lunch. They stroll, slowed by prams and grandparents and dogs. Nil didn’t seem so Catalan when I first met him. He had studied in the US and London and wasn’t from a town like Guillem. His English is good, and we talked about moving to New York. It seemed very possible for a while. My mother was thrilled. But once we had Ada, Nil changed. Maybe I did as well, but to be quite honest I don’t think that I did. It was Nil who came to depend on his parents and siblings—not so much for logistical support but for a sort of emotional buoying. The presence of his parents gave meaning to the children for him. Once there were five of us I felt alone again, closer to the woman I was that first summer after separating. It’s not that I lived on take-out sushi, cookies, and cigarettes, but I felt so easily that I could.
   Just a few months after Nil’s firm won an important international prize for the library in Belgium, we bought the Coderch house, up near the Cemetery of Sant Gervasi. It is a truly spectacular place built in the 1960s, just below Tibidabo, the highest peak over Barcelona. We each have our own studio with views of the surrounding mountains. I can spy on people going to visit the poet Joan Maragall’s tomb each Sunday. Nil has bloomed with the influx of money, with the constant presence of his family. He is happier than ever before. Maybe he always wanted the fancy car and the country house. We didn’t really know each other long enough to have talked about those things. We were still enjoying the long Saturday afternoons, the evenings spent preparing a moussaka or roasting a perfect fish, when I got pregnant with Ada.
   A few months into living together, when we were having all that seamless sex, I had told him, “I’m not set on children, but if I get pregnant I’m keeping it.”
   I had no idea that was true until I said it out loud. That was the magic of Nil at first—I became braver and more transparent around him. By letting myself love him, I also allowed myself to admit to all my other wants.
   I’m well into the Gothic Quarter now, which is crowded as always with tourists. I’m tired, I realize, not from the walking but from the wind. It has worn me out. Approaching the City Hall, where I have been married twice, I spot Guillem. He’s got big headphones around his neck like a teenager and is dragging his daughter by the hand. He laughs when he sees me, the high, nervous laugh he has always had. Sometimes it’s endearing; other times it saddens me.
   “What are you doing down here?” He uses the plural form of you. Only a lunatic would spend Sunday alone, it seems.
   “Just me,” I say. “Out for a walk.”
   I want to tell Guillem that I’ve been thinking of all our old walks all morning, all those Sundays spent hiking. I want to tell him how much I miss the country, the paths, and the deep, knotted roots, the smell of rosemary, the wild nettle that makes your ankles itch. How I have been thinking about getting lost and eating nuts and bananas and cold omelet sandwiches flattened by the water bottles in our backpacks. I want to tell him I haven’t experienced the country, the earth, the ground like that in years and years. How I haven’t just walked like I have this morning in almost a decade, but Guillem is complaining about his work schedule. There is no room for reminiscing.
   “We’re heading to basketball,” he says, glancing at Glòria.
   She is dark-haired and string-bean skinny, like Guillem’s sister. Her big eyes are almost black. It still seems absurd to me that I have nothing to do with her, that Guillem had a daughter with some doe-eyed, tiny-waisted Spanish woman.
   “Why don’t you take a few weekends off?” I ask him.
   “Sandra wants a new flat. I need the overtime.”
   I nod. There is no need to say anything. It’s as if we are siblings or just old, old friends. My phone buzzes.
   “Work?” he asks.
   We both have always resented the other for being busy.
   I check my phone, which I have managed to ignore the entire morning. There is a message from Laia and another from Ada asking where I am.
   I bid Guillem and Glòria goodbye. He seems relieved that I’m on my way.
   I text my daughter “Be there 20 minutes.”
   On my way to the metroI call Laia.
   “How long before I feel normal?” she asks.
   “About two days and also never again.”
   Ada was born at home, in a fourth-floor walk-up. There are even pictures of us. She, the product of all that seamless sex, was easy, peach-fuzzed, bright, and healthy. The twins were born in a clinic, Dr Ricart’s final cesarean. Though the only person I blame for that is Nil.
   At Montse’s, I imagine, everyone is watching TV with their mouths slightly open. Nil will try to get the children to do something more useful with their time but eventually give up. He used to wait for me to fall asleep, resting his head on my arm as I stared at the ceiling.
   “Can you close your eyes,” he would ask, “so I can rest too?”
   Montse is waiting in the doorway when I step out of the elevator.
   “They’ve just left,” she says.
   The tiredness, manifest in windburn on my cheeks, comes over me again, and I’m annoyed that she didn’t say they had left when I was still downstairs. But here I am, slipping my shoes off at the entrance to my sister-in-law’s apartment. Her boys nod in my direction and Montse offers me coffee.
   I haven’t eaten all day. We sit on the narrow balcony that overlooks the busy street. Montse balances a tray on her thighs, pours us both coffee and hands me a tiny square of dark chocolate. She rests her bare feet up on the rail, curling her painted toes over the shiny black metal.
   At our house we never hear cars. Here, there is so much traffic whizzing by: cars and motos and city buses.
   ¨Nil says you have lots of work.”
   “Yes,” I agree, but it isn’t really true.
   I don’t have more work than usual; I’m just in a solitary phase. That’s not the kind of thing you can say to Montse though. Actually, it terrifies me, makes me think I could run away from this family at any time, as I have from my others. That I could one day be sleeping across the world from my daughter Ada, thinking of her face as I do my mother’s or Guillem’s.
   Montse offers to make more coffee and opens an entire bar of chocolate, cracks it in two and hands me half. This slight indulgence feels intimate, tender.
   “Do you miss working?” I ask Montse.
   “Of course. Desperately.”
   By now I am rather desperately missing my children and husband, so I finish the coffee quickly, thank her for sustaining me with chocolate and explain that I have to get home, deal with homework, and what to make for dinner. My nephews kiss me perfunctorily and Montse hugs me goodbye. She senses, I think, that I’m about to cry.
   It’s uphill to get home. And colder now, the wind having picked up.
   From across the street I can see Ada doing what she calls her ballet routine in the living room. She is seven now—a real thinking, fearing person. Like me she lives inside her head and still talks to herself. Her brow furrowed in concentration, Ada reaches an arm straight out in front of her, chest-high, and slowly raises her foot to the imaginary barre. Watching her, I’m suddenly happy that we live in a glass house.
   My phone alerts me that the battery is dying and that I have two new messages. Nil has sent a picture of the children at the kitchen table presumably doing their homework, and Guillem has written something more suited to a black and white postcard than an iPhone but heartening nonetheless: The way, Elna, we still disagree about natural ability and actual needs. The way you’re a warrior. Somehow you dream and then always achieve—doting father, concrete house tinted green, daughter with your eyes—everything you’d ever want.
   Ada dips into a plié, Nil enters the room and applauds, and I begin to loosen my scarf, cross the street, ready to head inside.
   It is much later, after we have eaten dinner, loaded the dishwasher, and put the children to bed, once I’ve returned from taking Gertrude for a quick walk, when Nil, in bed, in that inky darkness where I so often hold my own reckonings, says that he is leaving. That I can stay with the children in that glass house. I will not be walking away; he will. This one here in the hills will be the house where I live a while longer. He doesn’t wait for me to fall asleep now; he is out easily. I stay awake well into the morning, my mother and Guillem looking in on me now and again, so much light pouring in.