Summary

The title page of Chapter 1 notes that the chapter takes place a month after conception. Later on, it becomes clear that this refers to the pregnancy of Katrina, one of the novel’s main characters. The third-person narration occasionally shifts between the past and present tenses as it introduces Reese, a transgender woman who had a habit of having affairs with married men to ward off loneliness. The current man she was sleeping with was a “cowboy-turned-lawyer” (6) who had contracted HIV by cheating on his wife with a different trans woman. His wife was unwilling to have a child with him despite the fact that his viral levels were undetectable.

Reese enjoyed the danger that the cowboy’s HIV-positive status brought to their sex life. She compared this enjoyment to the thrill she imagined cisgender women felt at the prospect of risking pregnancy by...