They lived in a penthouse overlooking Lincoln Park. The building was old and the walls were so thick that more noise came in through the windows than traveled from room to room. She heard buses groaning on Stockton Drive. She heard lions roaring in the zoo. But sometimes, as she rushed into the nursery, she wondered how long the baby had been crying.

Her husband’s job meant that he was often traveling. This month he was in Dubai, something to do with an investors’ group and a Montana-themed hotel. She could never remember what he had said the time difference was. But he often turned his cell phone off anyway. Sometimes he called her back.

The baby shower had been held only weeks before the baby was born. It was large and lavish. There had been a presidential candidate there, a friend of her husband’s who she hadn’t heard of. Shopping bags full of unopened gifts still lined the wall of the fourth bedroom. When she needed something, she dug through the bags and often found it: a burp rag, a bib, a pacifier. On one trip she found a baby monitor sealed in a gleaming plastic clamshell.

She cut the package open and plugged in the base unit next to the baby’s crib. She carried the receiver into the living room and turned it on. Static. She looked and saw that there were two channels. She changed the channel and heard her baby’s breathing, loud, as if they were in the room together.

She turned up the TV and sat back on the couch. A little while later the baby cried, its loud wail distorted, a row of LEDs going off like runway lights. She turned down the volume and went into the nursery.

At night the baby monitor kept her company, a single green LED letting her know it was working. She breathed in unison with her baby. She wondered why hearing the baby made her feel better than holding it. Then she drifted off to sleep.