More than the sheer loss of a large sum, the number 1,500 dogged me; it haunted me...It heaped me; it tasked me...I thought of a man I had never known and his $1,500 in coined gold. He died of consumption, they said...I, too, know that scraping sound...I know it so terribly well—a sound so many describe as a rattle, but I found it to scrape...scrape...scrape...eroding the foundations of even the best-laid plans.

Insomnia set in. I watched Charlotte sleep and breathe the morning fog, the grey light in which the last of the night's lamps burnt a ghoulish green and the air slid sideways insidiously along the sea.

One such grey morning, I gazed at Charlotte as though in a trance and saw her breath was unusually ragged; her flawless complexion seemed somehow mottled—as thought agitated from deep within. Her breathing grew shallower and ever more irregular, yet surely it came faster and faster.

I could hardly catch my own breath watching her; I was suddenly uncertain which one of us was having trouble breathing and Charlotte appeared to me as though at the end of a long, black tunnel, slipping further and further away, smoothly and insidiously as through the evil morning's ocean air, as though that ocean she loved might simply sweep her away from our very bed.

Like the Salem heretics, whose chests were piled high with rocks until their ribcages collapsed, I breathed less and less and less, unsure of what I could say to stop the torture, knowing it was too late to do anything in my defense.

From the edge of the bed, in terror, I watched her fidget and softly moan, the sound of her voice bringing her back to me from the end of the tunnel, but I somehow—I could not bring myself to touch her—I was terrified to touch her—for, if I did, I would know for certain this was not merely a nightmare...I prayed and prayed it was...I implored the gods! I prayed for unreality!

She struggled for another moment in her slumber and finally I shook myself free from my trance and reached for her long, clammy frame—at last unafraid—longing desperately to draw her closer than I had ever drawn her before, but she eluded my grasp, lunging over the side of the bed and vomiting profusely—

Charlotte was expecting.

Her morning sickness—which was unrelenting—alerted us to this fact.

At first, I was naturally elated! God knows we needed the good news! We were on our way to the family we both desired!

And we did both honestly desire a large family.

Yet the timing somehow stuck in my craw: I could not help but think of that penciled-in family that Charlotte had lately lost—due to my want of judgment. And try as I might to banish the thought from my head—a selfish, irrational thought it was—but I could not help but think that perhaps she had only let herself get with child in the wake of a loss I had perpetrated—it was almost as though she were getting back at me.

Somehow, suddenly, the need to produce her own blood became positively dire after losing those pathetic, heart-breaking attempts at records—our firstborn child felt like a reaction, a highly disproportionate one, to my mistake!

And, after all that had happened that first year of our marriage! Between Charlotte and me, between simply ourselves and the land, it was the perfect idyll! But the gold in them thar hills...Little did we know THAT GOLD—had already upended our every plan!