“Don’t stay too long,” Nick said. “Your mum made a tuna noodle casserole and I’ve no idea what that is but I can’t wait.”
“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said.
As their footsteps faded, I lay back down on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, which still had some of those glow-in-the-dark star stickers that stop working almost immediately and yet never let you peel them off. Lacey and I had invented a game where we shot rubber bands at them for points; you could still see some faint scuffmarks from our misses.
My hand groped around and closed on the ponytail holder on the carpet beside me. I cocked it with my fingers, closed one eye, and zeroed in on the smallest star in my roof galaxy.
“For the win,” I intoned, and let it fly. It glanced off the target and dropped gracefully to the floor next to me.
“Bull’s-eye,” I said. “Still a killer marksman.”
Killer. There he was again. He would always be there.
But then my hand fell onto my stomach, and a wave of emotion knocked my eyes shut. Nick’s face, when the last round hadn’t worked, was absolutely ashen. And a few days later, while hunting for a phone-charging cable, I’d found those same chipper pamphlets in his bedside table. He’d been to Dr. Akhtar on his own. He was curious.
Maybe he was having second thoughts, too.
CHAPTER TWO
The rest of the holidays in Iowa were, by and large, idyllic. We had a huge dump of snow on Christmas Eve, and Nick made two snowmen that he decorated to look like me and Lacey. We ordered takeout from some of the restaurants we’d passed on the way into town—the bread taco was a huge hit—and did puzzles, played games, and watched an endless string of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune (Nick developed a real fondness for the phrase Potent Potables). It was as screamingly American as we could make it, relaxed and festive and fun—but as our departure date inched closer, our moods slowly darkened around the edges, as if we knew we were fighting off an inevitable sorrow.
Nick curled up and slept for most of the flight home—or at least, I assume he did, because he donned an enormous sleep mask that made him look like Kanye West during that one really bad eyewear phase. I stared out the window and tossed around every possible way I could think of to tell my husband that we might need to take his swimmers out of the pool. (I had rejected that exact phrasing.)
In the end, I didn’t have to. We arrived home, jet-lagged and unkempt, and immediately padded into our expansive yellow kitchen. The staff was still on holiday, so Nick made himself a peanut butter sandwich and then stood at the marble island, staring at it, his face unspeakably glum.
“I want this family so badly, Bex,” he blurted. “I always imagined us having an entire houseful of kids. Four or five of them, running around and screaming and sliding down the banister. Playing loud games. Eating peanut butter sandwiches I’d made them on picnics. Breaking antiques. Chasing the dog.”
“We don’t have a dog,” I said.
“And we don’t have the children, either, and it hurts,” he said. “We’ve tried so hard. I want to be the one. I want it so much. I want them to be mine, but…”
I came around the kitchen island and hopped onto the barstool next to him. “All of our children will be yours,” I said. “One way or another. You know that, right?”
“I do, and I don’t, and I do,” he nattered, picking up the sandwich and then putting it down again. “I’ve never felt more hamstrung in my life. We can’t keep on as we have been, but the alternative…”
“If the alternative makes you unhappy, then we can totally keep on,” I said. “Maybe one of them will take.”
“No,” Nick said. “Your body has been through too much for us to keep doing things we know will fail. You’re a person, not a broodmare. It’s not 1592.”
“But apparently 1592 isn’t that different from now, in this one specific way,” I said. “There are rules.”
He picked at the crust. “I wish we could tell them all to stuff their rules,” he said. “Or pack everything and leave. For real, not just to faff about in Scotland in wigs until something forces us back. Have a baby or not. Adopt five kids. Live in that Von Trapp house in Sweden. I’d get a whistle, and you’d learn the guitar.”
“It’s a really great fantasy,” I said gently. “But it is a fantasy.”
He pulled up a barstool and sat, poking a finger rudely into the center of his sandwich.
“I thought about this a lot, too, over our break,” I admitted. “I was pretty messed up about it when we first got there, actually. But Mom and I had a big talk, and it changed my perspective a little. Like, we wouldn’t think twice about this if all…that…hadn’t happened, right? We’d have used Freddie in a heartbeat.”
“But all that did happen,” Nick said. He sounded so tired. “And it finds a way to keep reminding me that it happened. I’ve tried to have perspective. I’ve tried to remind myself that this baby would be made out of our love even if it’s not out of our genes. If you borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor to make a cake, that doesn’t make it his cake. I’d be the one rubbing lotion on your belly and massaging your feet, and holding your hand when you’re in labor, and getting up in the middle of the night, and changing diapers, and walking that baby to her first day of school. I would be Dad. Freddie would just be helping us figure out how to get her here. I know all of this is true, but…” He gulped air. “I’ve recited those
