Ever since Charlie had returned from Atlanta, several days ago, Alison had been wary and brittle. She clearly knew something was going on, but as long as she didn’t push it there was no reason to initiate a conversation—not yet, at least. Charlie needed time to figure things out. It was funny—when he was with Claire he was certain she was what he wanted: she was the love of his life. But when he was home with Alison and the kids, he felt rooted. He had planted this family here; he was loath to tear it up. He did love Alison—as much as, if not more than, most men love their wives, he thought. And he was crazy about his kids—Annie with her single-minded concentration and pixie chin and a smile just like his, Noah with his mother’s dark eyes and trusting gaze. How could he choose to leave them?
And yet in forming the question he had already supplied a phantom answer.
Sunday afternoon he drove into the city to work for a few hours. What with the accident and then his trip to see Claire, he’d been out of the office quite a bit; several deadlines were looming, and he hadn’t bothered checking e-mail for days. Alison was suspicious when he told her he needed to go in, and it was a guilty pleasure to be genuinely affronted when she didn’t believe he was telling the truth. “It’s just a few hours, honey,” he said. “I’ll be home by six. Let’s do a family dinner, okay?”
There were 316 e-mails in his in-box, half of which were spam and half of which had to be dealt with, one way or another.
Let’s raise the idea at the staff meeting on Tuesday. I’ll get you the proposal by Wednesday.
Delete, delete, delete.
Call my cell phone. We need to talk.
Charlie sat back in his chair. It was an e-mail from Claire, sent a few hours earlier. Why hadn’t she called? He looked in his bag and saw that he’d forgotten his cell phone; it was at home in the charger on his dresser. He hadn’t bothered to listen to the messages on his blinking office phone.
He dialed her number.
“Charlie,” she said breathlessly when she picked up. “I’m so glad you called. I didn’t know what to do. I was considering smoke signals to get your attention.”
“What’s going on?”
“Oh, my God,” she breathed. “I—I got home from the airport and Ben just—assaulted me—”
“Assaulted you?” Charlie broke in.
“No, no,” she said. “I mean, he confronted me. About us. He knew. He figured it out.”
“Oh. Wow,” Charlie said.
“Yeah. But then it was weird—he didn’t seem upset, really. I mean, I’m sure he is, but—well, you know Ben. He keeps a lot inside.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. He went out.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. I guess in a way it’s a relief. I hated lying to him.”
Charlie looked out his office window at a pigeon sitting on the ledge. He reached over and tapped the glass with his finger. Fly away, pigeon. The bird didn’t budge.
“So what about Alison?” Claire asked.
In bed that morning, before the kids were awake, Charlie had molded his body around Alison’s sleeping form. She stirred, opening her legs slightly, and he found his way in, stroking her until she came, arching back against him, and then he came, too, shuddering quietly and drifting back to sleep. When he woke up a little while later he could hear her downstairs with the kids, making breakfast—pancakes, by the sound of it. Noah was clamoring to crack the eggs, and demanding a dinosaur shape; Annie chimed in asking for a heart.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “She hasn’t said anything. But … she suspects. Something.”
“Umm,” said Claire. She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “So what are you going to do?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Charlie had meant every word he’d said to Claire in Atlanta, but—Christ, this was soon. He stared out the window at the pigeon, which, as if sensing the intensity of his gaze, bobbed its head at him and turned away.
“I’m not saying you should do anything,” Claire continued. “I was just wondering what you were thinking. And also—well—I guess there’s a chance Ben might call Alison. He didn’t say he was going to, but. You never know.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said, thinking, Holy shit. This is happening. He thought of the children’s fable about the dog with a bone that, seeing his reflection, mistakes it for a dog with a larger bone, and drops his own in pursuit of the illusion. “I need to figure this out,” he said. “I guess … I’ll call you later.”
“Listen, Charlie.” She sighed. “I didn’t mean to set anything in motion prematurely. You should wait until you’re ready. If—if you’re ready.”
He nodded abstractly, then realized she couldn’t see him. “I’ll give you a call in a few days,” he said.
When he hung up the phone he felt a grim foreboding. He stood up and went to the window, leaning his forehead against the cool glass. The bird was gone. Below, on another window ledge, Charlie could see several pigeons huddling together, and he wondered for a moment if one of them was his pigeon; if it had left his ledge in search of company, or if it had flown off to someplace else by itself.
AT ABOUT FIVE-THIRTY, as he was finishing up, Charlie called Alison from his office and asked if he could pick up anything for dinner on the way home.
“I was just about to boil water for pasta,” she said.
“No, don’t. You should take a break. How about Chinese?”
“All right.”
“I can be in Rockwell in forty-five minutes. I’m just about to leave.”
“I’ll call in the order,” she said. “Do you want anything special?”
This was a formality. In fact, their order was always the same: sesame noodles, dumplings, chicken and broccoli for the kids, garlic string beans, and Alison’s favorite, spicy shrimp and eggplant. She would call their order in to the least mediocre of the mediocre Chinese restaurants in town (and the only one that served brown rice, as Alison told newcomers to town who asked for a recommendation, though they never actually ordered brown rice themselves), and he would pick it up.
But this time he said, “Maybe so.” It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that he wanted something special, but perhaps—yes—he did. “How about—uh—a noodle thing, like chow fun. With pork.”
“Instead of shrimp and eggplant?” He could hear the surprise and disapproval in her voice.
“We could do both.”
“That’s too much food,” she said. “And we already have a noodle thing, sesame noodles.”
“So cancel the sesame noodles.”
“But the kids love them.”
“So just order all of it. We can have leftovers.”
“That place is never any good on the second day. You know that.”
He sighed. “Come on, Alison, it’s eight bucks. I’m in the mood for chow fun. Could you just order it, please?”
“Okay,” she said tersely.
As he took the elevator down to underground parking, he wondered at Alison’s truculence. Though of course she had every reason to be mistrustful, Charlie had no idea whether she actually was. She’d never confronted him with any suspicions; if she had them, she’d done a good job of keeping them to herself. Even if she did think he was up to something, she had no reason to suspect that Claire was involved. Unless … what if Ben had called? But surely then they wouldn’t be arguing over noodles. No—she didn’t know. He was sure of it.
In a way it might have been easier if she did. The idea of being honest with Alison was profoundly unnerving. How was he going to summon the strength to tell her? And what would happen then? Charlie felt as if he were poised on the edge of a cliff, and he could either step back to the safety of land or step forward into a free fall. He knew what was behind him, but had no clue what lay ahead.
AT DINNER ALISON was friendlier. She took some chow fun for herself and exclaimed over how good it was, then urged it on the kids, both of whom refused to try it. Too many unidentifiable green things. “Just take a noodle. A noodle! You love noodles,” she said to Annie in the falsely jovial tone of a Mouseketeer.
“I love sesame noodles,” Annie said. “And only because they have peanut butter on them.”
“It’s not peanut butter. It’s sesame paste,” Alison said.
“Eww. Then I don’t like them either.”
“It’s peanut butter,” Charlie said quickly. “Mom was kidding.” He raised his eyebrows at Alison, who nodded, signaling her complicity.
“Is that true, Mommy?” Annie asked suspiciously.
“Yes.”
Annie sniffed the brownish noodles already congealing on her plate. “Okay. Because I do love them,” she said, clearly relieved.
Alison glanced at Charlie, who smiled back. Disaster averted. It was these kinds of moments, Charlie realized with a stab in his gut, that he would regret giving up most, the moments he couldn’t share with anyone else, embedded in the intimacy of creating a family. He hadn’t really thought it through, but suddenly it occurred to him that all of this would be off-limits as soon as he told Alison what was going on.
He looked at Alison, cutting broccoli into Skittles-size pieces on Noah’s plastic Tigger plate, furrowing her brow in concentration. There was a fine vertical line between her eyes that seemed to have become permanent in the past few months. In her dark hair he saw glints of gray. She was wearing a long-sleeved purple T-shirt and old Levi’s, her “mommy uniform,” as she called it, and the holes in her earlobes were empty; she must have forgotten to put earrings in, or maybe she didn’t wear them anymore. He had to admit that he didn’t know. It had been a long time since he’d noticed much about her. Was that a symptom of the problem, he wondered, or was it, in a larger sense, the problem itself?
After all that fuss about the noodles, Charlie didn’t want them. He wasn’t hungry. He choked down a few bites, moved the food around on his plate like a cagey anorectic, and went to the fridge for a second Sam Adams. Or maybe a third. Yep—he’d gulped down one right away when he came in, opened a second when they sat down to eat. When everyone else was finished, he scraped and stacked the plates—which Alison had once told him was rude to do at the table, but which he did now anyway—and loaded the dishwasher.
“Do you want to do the dishes, and I’ll do the kids?”
“Nah, I’ll do the kids,” he said. He brought the plates over to the counter, holding his beer by the neck, and then took a long swig. He was beginning to feel a little fuzzy around the edges, and it was so much more appealing than the alternative that he determined to finish this one and have another.
“Okay,” Alison said equitably. “I’m reading On the Banks of Plum Creek to Annie; she knows which chapter we’re on. And Noah gets to choose three books from his shelf.”
“Four! Four books,” Noah said. “No, five.”
“Right,” Charlie said, thinking, Wouldn’t it be much more efficient to read them both the same book?
“I’ve tried reading them the same book and it never works,” Alison said, divining his thoughts. “But you could try.”
“I want to read Plum Creek,” Annie said, pouting, “not dumb baby books.”
“That’s it, then, we’ll read Plum Creek,” said Charlie. “And six books for you, Mister.”
“Yay!” Noah dashed out of the kitchen and clambered up the stairs in giddy anticipation. Annie slunk out after him.
Charlie finished his beer and put the bottle in the recycling bin under the sink, where it clinked loudly against the others. For a moment he lingered in the doorway. Could he get another beer without Alison noticing? Spying a tub of Country Crock whipped margarine on the counter, he grabbed it as an alibi and opened the fridge. While Alison’s back was turned, he slipped a beer into the front right pocket of his khakis. “Well, I’m heading up,” he said cheerily, ducking out the door.
The two-socket ceiling light in the upstairs hall was bright, too bright; it made him wince. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? The bulbs were probably 100 watt, too strong for the fixture. Charlie turned it off as Noah came tearing out of his bedroom, wearing socks and nothing else.
“I want to take a bath!” he shouted, and against Charlie’s feeble protests he ran into the kids’ bathroom and turned on the spigot.
“I don’t have to take one, do I?” Annie said, coming into the hall in her yellow nightgown with white unicorns frolicking across the bodice and matching yellow slippers. “Anyway, I told Mommy I’m too old to take a bath with a boy.”
Reaching into his pocket and shifting the cold beer so it wouldn’t make a mark like an iron on his now partially frozen upper thigh, Charlie realized he didn’t have a bottle opener. Shit. He couldn’t go downstairs; it would be too obvious. “He’s not a boy, he’s your baby brother,” he said absently, going into Annie’s room and rummaging around on her little white desk. Plastic ruler? No. Stapler? Scissors? Hmm—no. Finally he came across a claw-shaped staple remover, and positioned it, Jaws of Life–like, over the bottle cap. Twisting and prying, he managed to get the cap off at the expense of the staple remover, which appeared irreparably mangled. He tossed it into Annie’s white plastic wastebasket with a thud, and took a long swallow.
“My staple remover!” Annie cried, rushing toward the wastebasket and sifting quickly through the contents. Damn, she must have been watching. Holding the battered item up accusingly, she wailed, “Daddy, you broke it!”
“I know, I know, shhhh,” Charlie said, holding his free hand out in front of him and flapping it as if he were dribbling a basketball. “Hush, sweetie. It’s not a big deal. It was cheaply made, anyway. I’ll get you a better one.”
“I don’t want a better one. I want this one. You ruuuined it!” she sobbed, holding it tightly against her chest.
In the next room, Noah started to howl. “The water’s too hot. It bunned my fingas. MOM-MY!”
With both of his children in tears, and his wife already sprinting up the stairs, Charlie took another gulp of his beer, draining it, and set it strategically behind him on the desk, blocking it from Alison’s view. What was wrong with these children? Why did everything have to be so dramatic?
“What in the world is going on?” Alison said as she came into the room.
“Daddy broke my staple remover!”
“I bunned my fingas!” Noah said, barreling in behind her, holding up his injured digits.
Alison inspected the chubby splayed hand. Apparently satisfied that Noah would live, she turned to Charlie and asked, “What were you doing with a staple remover?”
“Oh—well—I was just—”
“He was opening a bottle, Mommy, and that is not what you’re supposed to use a staple remover for,” Annie said indignantly.
“What kind of bottle?” Alison asked, and Charlie, his ears reddening slightly, reached behind his back and retrieved the empty Sam Adams. “Another beer?” she said. For a moment they were all silent, listening to the water filling the bathtub in the next room. The children gazed up at both of them with their mouths open. Alison looked at them and then at Charlie, as if to say let’s not do this here. “Okay, look. You go finish the kitchen. I’ll get them to bed.”
“Awww, why can’t I have a bath?” Noah whined.
“But—” Charlie said.
“Charlie, you’re drunk,” she said quietly.
“I am not.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” she said.
“It’s nice to have the moral upper hand, isn’t it?” he said somewhat desperately.
She gave him a look of such cold fury that he stepped backward, bumping against the desk. “You would know,” she said.
AFTER FINISHING THE dishes—which were almost done, anyway; Alison was a marvel of efficiency—Charlie sank onto the couch in the TV room and flipped to CNN to watch the news. Unfortunately MarketWatch was on, which made him anxious (the fact that he’d never been particularly interested in the stock market was his secret; he knew it was his masculine duty to care, but now that the market was tanking, taking his 401K with it, he cared even less), so he flipped through channels, skipping from a family comedy from the seventies to a show with contestants eating bugs, before landing on The Simpsons.
This was more his speed. He watched the show, prone, with one wary eye. When the episode ended—a complicated story involving Clint Eastwood, mud pies, and the nuclear power plant where Homer worked—Charlie turned off the TV. The house was quiet; the children, he concluded, were in bed. He sat up, feeling groggy. Four beers weren’t so many; in college that amount wouldn’t have fazed him at all, but he wasn’t used to drinking that way anymore. And he hadn’t eaten much dinner. All he wanted to do now was go to bed.
He could hear Alison in the room directly above him—their bedroom—padding around. He knew he should go up there, but he didn’t want to.
He sat up. Fuck. There was a small mallet in his brain, hammering his cerebral cortex. With each throbbing pulse his head seemed to grow larger.
Lying down again, he closed his eyes. He might have even drifted off.
“So what was all that about?” a blunt, angry voice demanded from above.
Charlie blinked. Groggily he pulled himself onto one elbow and swung his legs over the side of the couch. He squinted up at the shadowy figure looming over him—Alison, wearing blue flannel pajamas (in April? An unseasonably cold April, but still). Her face, free of makeup and damp around the hairline, shiny with moisturizer, seemed strangely exposed, as if she’d not only washed her face but also scrubbed off an epidermal layer.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Nine-forty-five.”
“Oh. Wow.” He rubbed his face.
She crossed her arms. “We need to talk.”
He frowned, as if surprised. He wasn’t surprised, but he didn’t want her to think he’d been waiting like a coward for her to make the first move—which was, of course, exactly what he had been doing. “Okay,” he said.
She sat down on the couch, close to the edge, as if she might skitter away at any second. She bit the corner of her lip, twisting her mouth into a grimace. “I just realized something,” she said. “You have been blaming me since the accident for killing that little boy.”
“Alison—”
“Stop. That’s not what I realized. What I realized is that I’ve been blaming myself, too. I’ve been blaming myself for killing that boy, and for the problems in our marriage, and for the fact that you’ve essentially absented yourself from our lives. I thought it was all my fault. But you know what?” Her voice rose in a sharp crescendo. “I wasn’t the one who ran a red light. I wasn’t holding my child on my lap in the front seat. Maybe if I hadn’t had two drinks I could’ve moved out of the way faster—but probably not; I’ve never had fast reflexes, especially driving, especially at night. Believe me, I’ll live with that memory for the rest of my life. But I will not live with your judgment and scorn.”
“Hey, hey,” he said gently, trying to calm her down, “I don’t—”
“You’re gone most of the time,” she snapped. “You’re gone emotionally, too. And when you actually do spend some time with us you get drunk. You fucking hypocrite. You’ve basically checked out, haven’t you?”
He waited to see if she had more to say, but she just sat there, looking at the floor, her chest moving rapidly up and down in her flannel pajama top. That old philosophical question flitted through his mind: who breaks the thread, the one who pulls or the one who hangs on?
This is happening. There’s no turning back.
“Alison, you’re right,” he said, putting his hand on her arm. “You’re right. About all of it.”
An evolving expression slid across her face, like a cloud moving across the sun—relief to mistrust to defensiveness. “What do you mean?”
“I guess … I guess I have blamed you. Maybe I thought if I made you into a villain it would be easier.”
“What would be easier?”
Shit. “It would be easier to … say what I have to say.”
She recoiled, pulling her arm away. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Oh God.” She put her hands over her eyes.
“I just—It’s nothing you’ve done.”
“I knew it,” she murmured.
“Knew what,” he said, trying to sound sympathetic instead of like he was fishing. How much did she know?
“That you weren’t—in love with me anymore.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I do love you. I’ll always love you.”
“Please,” she said, holding up her hand.
“I don’t. … ”
“Just tell me.”
There wasn’t a single molecule of Charlie that wanted to be having this conversation. He felt as if he had been pushed out onto a tightrope, high above the ground; now all he could do was try to keep his balance and make it across.
“I’m—I think I’m in love with Claire,” he said.
He had heard the expression “the blood drained from her face,” but he’d never seen it before. Alison actually went white. “Wh-what?” she sputtered.
Charlie shrugged helplessly, deploying an old weapon, the equivalent of a girl flirting to get her way. If he could become a little boy in her eyes, naughty or willful or irresponsible, it might not be so devastating; she might even somehow forgive him. Unfortunately this tactic seemed to have lost all effectiveness.
“Claire Ellis? My-best-friend-from-childhood Claire?”
He didn’t respond. It hardly seemed necessary.
“You’ve got to be joking,” she said. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Please tell me this is a joke.”
“It isn’t a joke.”
“What—how—” She shook her head, as if trying to wake from a bad dream.
“I think I’ve been in love with her since Cambridge,” he said haltingly.
She stared at him.
He looked down.
“Go on,” she said.
“She—Claire—didn’t want me then. I mean, she was already with Ben.”
“Jesus.” Alison’s lip curled in disgust. This, he could tell, was even worse—that Claire had first rejected him and then passed him along to her.
“And I thought the feeling would go away,” he continued. “I mean, I had a crush on her, but she was with Ben, and that was that. I liked Ben, too. I liked being with both of them. For a while I thought maybe it was that—I just wanted to be in their life, you know? Their life—their lives—seemed so much more interesting than mine. And then … you came.”
Alison’s body went rigid. She looked straight ahead, at some imaginary point in space halfway across the room.
“And you were so beautiful,” he said. “You are—you are so beautiful.”
“Don’t, Charlie.”
“I fell in love with you, I did. I had never met anyone like you. So poised and yet—I don’t know—open.”
He could see tears welling in her eyes.
“I wanted you. I wanted to marry you.”
“You were in love with her.”
“No, I—I wasn’t then. Or I convinced myself that I wasn’t, because there was nothing I could do about it.”
“So I was the consolation prize,” she said bitterly.
“No. No,” he said, “it didn’t feel that way.” He had intended to be scrupulously honest with Alison—he owed it to her; it was the least he could do. But she was right. The stark truth was that he would not have married her had Claire been free. And even though he did grow to love Alison—he had been, he truly believed, in love with her—a part of him was always thinking about Claire, imagining how things would have been different if he had married Claire instead. “I was happy to be with you.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t believe you.”
He shifted uncomfortably.
“This whole marriage has been a lie.”
“No, Alison.”
“Just stop the bullshit,” she said. “How long have you been fucking her?”
“Al—”
“How long?”
He sighed. “We started seeing each other a few months ago. In the winter.”
He could see her calculating the date in her head. “When?”
“Before the holidays.”
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Where? Where did you go?”
“The—the first time?”
She made a face.
“A hotel. In Midtown.”
“Where was I? Or was this on your lunch hour?”
“No, it was—it was a Friday. You were visiting Pam Thurgood in upstate New York with the kids.”
“Aah,” she said, nodding slowly, “I remember that weekend. You said you had to work late, right? That was why you couldn’t come.”
“You know,” he said hesitantly, “the actual details are kind of irrelevant.”
“Really,” she said.
“Yeah. I just think … it’s not important what happened when, and all that.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “So how was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was she a good fuck?”
“Come on, Alison.”
“What? Is that irrelevant, too? I’m guessing it matters to you.”
“I just—I don’t think we need to be doing this.”
“Ummm.” She nodded, parodying amiability. “Yeah, you’re right. We don’t need to be doing this. You’re fucking my best friend—you say you’re ‘in love with’”—she knifed quote marks in the air with hooked fingers—“my best friend—my best friend—but you’re right, how rude, how impolite of me to ask you anything about it.” She bit down on the words, her voice rising with each syllable until she was practically shouting.
Jesus, she’s going to wake the children. Charlie wanted to stifle her somehow; he had to restrain himself from putting his hand over her mouth or telling her to shut the fuck up. He knew he didn’t deserve to be impatient with her; he had to hear her out, but Christ it was hard. He didn’t want to explain, pick over each detail, sit there and take it as the enormity of it sunk in and she got more and more furious.
“Yeah, that would be crass, wouldn’t it?” she continued. Now she was on her feet. “You fucking asshole! You low-life. You brought two children into the world, and now you’re going to abandon them.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“I’m not, Alison. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, okay. I see. Is Claire going to move in with us?”
“Alison, please.”
“I have given the best years of my life to you—that fucking cliché, it’s true,” she cried, spitting the words at him. “I devoted myself to you, to this marriage. To being a family.”
“I know, I know,” he said, patting the air with his hands, as if trying to tamp down her emotion. “And you are an amazing wife and mother. This may sound crazy, Alison, but I mean it—this is not about you.”
“Exactly!” she screeched. “This is not about me. It’s never been about me, has it?”
“Alison,” he said miserably.
“Stop saying my name.” She strode out of the room, and for a brief moment Charlie wondered if the conversation was over. Then she came back with a handful of tissues, which she pulled out of her balled fist one after another like a magician with silk scarves. She blew her nose loudly. Tears were streaming down her face. “Does Ben know?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, he does.”
“How do you know?”
“Because … Claire called me.”
She hiccupped. “When?”
“Today.”
“When today? When you were ‘at work’?”
He nodded.
She shook her head. “I knew you were fucking lying about going to work today,” she sobbed.
“I wasn’t lying. I really had to go in.”
“How convenient, that she knew you ‘had to go in.’”
“She didn’t know. She called my cell phone.”
“Bullshit. Your cell phone was here.”
“Right,” he said, struggling to keep up with her detective work, “so then she sent me an e-mail on the off chance—Jesus, Al, what does it matter?” he said finally. “I wasn’t lying to you about today. I had to go to work. I didn’t see Claire. But … I have lied to you. I have been lying to you. I hate that part of it—”
“Oh, you hate that part of it?”
“Yes, I do. I hate lying to you.”
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed. She collapsed onto the couch beside him and doubled over, as if in agony, clutching her stomach with one hand and sobbing into her wadded-up tissues in the other. “Why? Why?”
There was really no answer. He was doing this because he could not keep skimming along the surface of his life without one day crashing into something hard and unpleasant, a truth about himself he had long tried to avoid—that his inability to make difficult decisions was what had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He wanted both lives; he didn’t want to have to choose. He wanted this life with Alison and a parallel one with Claire, but that didn’t seem to be possible. He was doing this because he had finally realized that it took more of an effort to keep the chaos contained than it did to let it go.
And though he did, genuinely, love his children with his whole being, and hated the idea that they, like him—like Alison—would suffer through a divorce, he was convinced that he would only get one chance to feel this kind of passion, to express it, to live. In a way, it was as simple as that: you only get one life. And though his children were everything to him, sometimes he closed his eyes and wondered what his life would be like if he had claimed what he wanted from the beginning, if he had not given up so easily, and, as a result, had never made them.
He wouldn’t say any of this, of course. He couldn’t say it. So he put his hand gently on her back while she cried, and eventually she grew quiet.