Cora’s mother always used to say children were whipped up by the wind, that even the quiet ones would come in after playtime made wild by it. Cora feels it in herself now, that restlessness. Outside, gusts lever at the fir trees behind the house and burst down the side passage to hurl themselves at the gate. Inside, too, worries skitter and eddy. Because tomorrow—if morning comes, if the storm stops ­raging—Cora will register the name of her son. Or perhaps, and this is her real concern, she’ll formalize who he will become.

Cora has never liked the name Gordon. The way it starts with a splintering sound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a thud like someone slamming down a sports bag. Gordon. But what disturbs her more is that she must now pour the goodness of her son into its mold, hoping he’ll be strong enough to find his own shape within it. Because Gordon is a name passed down through the men in her husband’s family, and it seems impossible it could be any other way. But this doesn’t stop her arguing back and forth with herself, considering all the times she’s felt a person’s name might have influenced the course of their life. Amelia Earhart. The Lumière brothers. Only last week, she’d noticed a book on her husband’s bedside table, Clinical Neurology by Lord Walter Russell Brain.

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” she’d asked.

“Coincidence,” Gordon had replied. “Although you wouldn’t believe the number of urologists called Burns, Cox, and Ball. And, actually, Mr. Legg is pretty common in orthopedics.”

Do you not see the risk? she’d wanted to say. Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn’t. Because surely that was the point.