Excerpt from Happiness by Heather Harpham, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But Brian knew how to work. His life was ordered, boundaried to the extreme. A man who, by his own admission, ate broccoli with brown rice and garlic sauce every night for dinner. A man who pruned back the trivial decisions, who wore French Blue dress shirts and black pants every day of the week, for consistency's sake. A man with an embedded internal clock, which told him to sit and write at the same hour, day after day. A man with a gift, and the dense garden of habit grown around it for protection.

We were a study in opposites; hopelessly attracted. We floated about from dinners to concerts to parties with friends. Holding hands, touching each other's clothes. When we walked through the Village, along Sixth Avenue, shoulder to shoulder, I had a liquid sense of well-being. We were in the throes of infatuation, soft-minded and easily persuaded of our rightness for each other by sexual thrill. But there was a bedrock quality beneath the giddiness, something I hadn't felt before. Being with him gave me the unfamiliar feeling of being what I was—a grown woman.

***

Within minutes of arriving at UCSF Medical Center we were hustled upstairs to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU, pronounced nick-u). I stood beside the baby's incubator; it had two portals you could slip your hands through, to touch your person. This was the extent of what you could do for your baby in the NICU—stand beside the box stroking a finger or toe or tiny elbow beneath the blanket. I stroked my girl's knee.

A petite doctor with a blond bun crossed the room.

"Listen," she said, nodding in the baby's direction, "she needs a central line placed into her umbilicus, immediately, for the exchange transfusion." The doctor projected the air of an overachieving-homecoming-queen-valedictorian-tennis-champ. Probably played Rachmaninoff's harder pieces for fun and relaxation. "Please sign this release. It's just a procedure, not surgery. The umbilicus is numb, so she won't feel a thing." Beneath her lab coat, visible at the collar and cuffs, was a heavy silk blouse, cream colored. She was too young, too pretty, too sure of herself to be a decent doctor. But she was who we had. I tried to parse what she'd said: just a procedure, not surgery. She wanted to attach a tube to the baby. That much I got.

I wanted to talk to the nice doctor with the soft boyish face and glasses, from Marin General. But he had sent us to her. The blond doctor was waiting for my answer; would I allow her to attach the tube or not? She held out the form and a pen.

Would a plastic part really improve the baby per se?

What would Brian do? I tried to summon some of his steadiness, his ability to lever rationality into crisis. I signed. She exhaled, her shoulders dropped. Astonishing! This woman was as nervous about my judgments and decisions as I was about hers. A nurse scooped up the baby and left the room.

Excerpted from Happiness by Heather Harpham. Copyright © 2017 by Heather Harpham. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.