CHAPTER ONE

The last time we were at the Ritz in Paris I had my fifth miscarriage at breakfast.

This Christmas, I was no longer in contention for the same bizarre privilege. Now that I’d had my ovaries confiscated by my doctor, I found myself oscillating between staring at my husband and daughter adoringly and wondering how long it would take to drown myself in the Seine. It had become an unwritten family tradition that we always came to the Ritz for Christmas. This year, as we drove to the hotel, with the moon beside us—a fine lick of chrome in an upside-down crescent—the driver pointed out landmarks I already knew well. I nodded, feigning interest before cutting him off to ask if he had a Motorola phone charger.

“Non, madame, non.”

“Ce n’est pas grave,” I said, sinking back into the front seat of the car. We drove past La Madeleine, lit up from below to emphasize its imposing Corinthian beauty. The few times I’d chosen to pray for my fertility, it had been in that church. Perhaps that’s why my prayers for another baby had yet to be answered—maybe God could sense my secular proclivity.

The driver continued to prattle on about Napoleon, then Sarkozy. I gave him a tight-lipped smile; I wasn’t really listening. The truth was I could’ve been in Paris or Putney, it didn’t matter. Of course, I knew Paris was beautiful. Everyone did. But it was like I was trapped inside a snow globe that nobody was shaking. All I could think about was life back home. I kept hearing the doctor’s voice in my head telling me the exact thickness of our surrogate Jess’s uterine lining and wondering if she’d been taking enough folic acid in preparation for the embryo transfer.

We stopped at a red light, where a young couple crossed the road holding hands. The girl was laughing at something her boyfriend said, throwing back her head and playfully pushing him away. I rolled up my window. It had started spitting and my coat was cashmere. The hail came out of nowhere, pelting little wet bullets against the car’s windscreen. I held down the power button again on my phone, but still nothing.

“Fuck,” I said, which seemed to take the driver by surprise. “Pardon, monsieur,” I added, quickly returning to my French sensibility. I turned around to face Tom in the backseat. “Tom, is your BlackBerry working?” He was still in his suit but without the tie. His eyes were closed, his head resting against the window. Our daughter, Chloe, was asleep with her head on his lap, her little body curled up like a kitten beside him. On paper, the picture was idyllic. A healthy, happy child, born with a double set of lashes, safe in the lap of her father. But even the fortunate hand I’d been dealt didn’t stop my longing for one more baby.

“Tom, can you check if your phone is working?” I said again. “Mine isn’t.”

“I’ll do it at the hotel,” he said, rubbing his face, his voice sleepy. “I don’t want to wake Chloe up.”

“Could you just check? Jess might’ve texted us.”

“Oh, so now you want me to be on my phone. I’ll get it once we’re at the hotel.” I clamped my lips tightly between my teeth. I jabbed at the button that switched off my heated seat; the sudden flare of concentrated warmth was making me want to vomit. Then I heard that familiar faint dink of Tom’s BlackBerry.

“Can you see who that is?” I said, my throat slightly dry from the recycled air on the plane.

“Honor, we’re less than two minutes from the hotel.”

“I’m not asking how far we are from the hotel. I’m simply asking you to check your phone.” A slight edge had crept into my voice, a tone I recognized as my mother’s, sharp and unlikable. Chloe woke up then. She shot upright, like most four-year-olds discombobulated by not being in her own bed.

“Are we there yet, Daddy?”

“Almost,” he said, pushing the hair off her face.

“Tom? The phone?” He didn’t look at it, he just shoved it into my palm.

Our fertility doctor insisted we not take a pregnancy test for two weeks after any embryo transfer, but there was no harm in asking Jess how she was feeling; there might be early signs that the transfer had worked. Of course, it wasn’t Jess who’d texted, it was the alarm company, duly followed by another from our friend Lauren, telling us she had accidentally put the code in wrong when she was picking up our dog Duke’s lead. I replied, then texted our surrogate Jess on Tom’s phone, trying to compose a message that seemed “happy-go-lucky” but most likely read “desperate.” I knew I was teetering on overbearing, but at this point I had ceased caring about propriety.

The two-week wait for Jess to take a pregnancy test in tandem with my lofty drop into medical menopause at thirty-three had done little for my Christmas spirit. The irony of sitting in the waiting room at a fertility doctor’s office to discuss having another baby when there was nothing in my arsenal wasn’t lost on me. Nor was the fact that Tom and I hadn’t had sex since Chloe’s birthday six months ago. Apparently, infertility was an underrated but effective method of contraception.

By the time we pulled up outside the hotel, the rain had dwindled to a drizzle. The French flag draped above the entrance, catching ever so slightly in the damp breeze. Two bellhops dressed in Ritz blue stood by the door. They ran to the car, umbrellas up and at the ready.

“Bonsoir, Messieurs-dames,” said the taller of the two. There was a slight wobble to his voice. I didn’t recognize him from previous years and his bumfluff indicated that this was a temporary job between life choices. They took our suitcases, and I watched Chloe and Tom trot away from me up the red-carpeted stairs, Chloe’s velvet coat blending into the carpet’s rich pigment, before they disappeared through the revolving doors.

The lobby was filled top-to-toe with the bustle of Christmas. The grand piano had been set aside to make way for the giant tree, a sparkling, verdant spectacle, decorated in the hotel’s signature palette of peach and champagne, with a light dusting of Ritz-blue baubles sprinkled here and there.

I pocketed my gloves and put my bag down on one of the gilt chairs by the reception desk. Chloe was making the most of the empty lobby, pirouetting up and down the length of the foyer. It didn’t matter how many years we’d been coming to the Ritz, I never got used to the height of its ceilings or the grandeur of its old-world beauty, a stark contrast to the dingy cottage my mother rented every summer in rural Normandy.

I stood breathing in the smell of amber and freshly dropped pine needles, trying to remember the last time we’d been in the lobby this late at night. It must have been before Chloe was even born, when we used to stumble in blurry-eyed after one too many dry martinis at Harry’s Bar.

Tom turned and asked me for his BlackBerry. I walked over and put it on the reception desk, making sure it slammed hard enough to make a point, but not hard enough to damage it. He didn’t bite, though, which only wound me up more. We’d been having the same argument about my insistence on having another baby for the best part of two years.

I picked up my bag and marched off in an exaggerated huff before calling the lift. It was only when I pressed the button that I realized I should’ve left it for Chloe.

“You know she likes doing the buttons,” Tom said as he joined me by the polished doors.

“She can press the ones inside,” I said. “Chloe, come on. It’s late!” But as soon as she saw the button illuminated, her bottom lip began to tremble. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t know what I was thinking. You can press the ones to go up. And all the other buttons that need pressing forever and ever, okay?” She nodded, but her lip was still turned down. The lift doors opened, and I squinted as we stepped inside. The light was unnecessarily bright and there were mirrored panels on all sides, dominoing us into oblivion. As the doors closed, the collar of my coat tightened around my neck. The lift suddenly seemed to shrink like an airless incubator.

Tom pointed to our floor, so Chloe knew which button to press. It was the little things with Chloe. I used to be the same about my coffee or starting a new notepad. But now my mind was in a constant fog of Jess’s synthetic progesterone injections and phantom colostrum production.

I undid my top button and bent down beside Chloe, my long navy coat falling around me like a cape.

“Can I show you a trick?” I whispered. Her eyes widened. I took her little hand in mine and swiped her fingers down every brass button. Chloe let out a little giggle, knowing her mummy had just done something naughty. I stood up. Tom wasn’t laughing, and when the doors opened on the next floor, he exaggerated his yawn for Chloe’s sake and got out.

“Daddy needs some exercise, cherub,” he said, before kissing her head goodbye but saying nothing to me—so different from when we’d role-played him chatting me up in this very lift before escorting me to his “room.” Tom liked to take the stairs, but that wasn’t why he was doing so tonight.

We were already in our suite when Tom walked in shortly after us, still visibly seething over my behavior. The rift continued throughout our bedtime routines, without a détente in sight.

“There we go,” I said to Chloe as I tucked her into her adorable little bed. Her eyes were at half-mast and her fingers were stroking her cuddly, Hedgie. We’d packed last year’s white-and-pink-striped pajamas. They were big then; they were getting a touch too small around the ankles now. Nothing like a child to mark the passing of time. When Chloe was a baby, Tom would order a bottle of Pol Roger while I was getting Chloe to sleep. He would have a cold glass waiting for me as I crept out of her bedroom, being careful not to make a peep and wake her. But there was little chance of any champagne corks popping tonight.

Copyright © 2025 by Loretta Rothschild