“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
Kim comes into the kitchen with us and starts putting teabags into cups. “Would you like a drink?” she asks Jude.
He shakes his head. “No thanks, I’ve got to get back to the Ark shortly.” He looks at me. “I heard you were off sick and wanted to make sure you were okay. You’re never sick.”
“Yeah, I’m okay. I just needed some time to think.”
He nods slowly. He watches Kim as she starts emptying the dishwasher, then says to me, “Can we talk?”
“I don’t think there’s any point.” I stand stiffly, conscious that I’m frightened about being alone with him. Not physically, but because he has a way of getting around me—he always has. And if he starts talking about getting back together, I might not be strong enough to resist him.
“All right, I’ll say it here.” He’s half-amused, half-annoyed. “I regret what I said on Saturday evening. I’d had too much to drink, and I was tired. I’m sorry.” He looks into my eyes as he says it with feeling.
I shift from one foot to another. “Okay.” I frown. “It doesn’t change anything, though.”
He tips his head to the side. Usually, he’s quick to react, impatient and irritable, but today he waits for me to explain myself.
“You were right,” I tell him. “You don’t want kids, and I do. That’s not something we can work around.”
He leans on the counter. “I know what I said, but it’s not that I don’t want kids. Like I said yesterday, it just seems crazy to be worrying about your fertility at this stage. We have, like, a dozen steps to take before we reach that.”
“I know what you’re saying.” How can I make him understand? “But it’s like we’re both setting out on a journey, and we’re talking about what road we’ll take and what we’ll see on the way, and we don’t even know where we’re going yet! If our destination isn’t the same, then what’s the point?”
“Well, the journey’s half the fun, isn’t it?”
I glare at him. “Only if you know where you’re going! What’s the point in investing all that time and effort in a relationship if you have no intention of staying together?”
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t stay together. I’m saying that sometimes your destination changes over time, and it seems dumb to me to set it in concrete now.”
My head is spinning; I don’t know what he’s trying to say. “You’re saying that you might change your mind about having kids?”
He shrugs. “Or you might decide you don’t want them eventually. Who knows? I’m barely thirty and you’re still in your twenties. Why are we even talking about this right now?”
He thinks he can work on me, and that he can change my mind. He’s so fucking arrogant.
“You’re talking as if we’re eighteen.” I’m frustrated that he can’t see my point of view. “If we were teens, or even twenty-five, I’d agree a hundred percent, but we’re not. A woman’s body clock is a real thing, whether you want it to be or not.”
“I get that. But I come back to the point that worrying about your fertility is only going to make things worse.” He looks at Kim then. She’s pouring hot water over the teabags, and she turns to pass me mymug and sees him looking at her. “Tell her,” he says. “Tell her what happened last night.”
She stares at him, then looks at me, startled. I look from her to him. “What’s going on?”
“I spoke to Simon this morning,” he says. “Go on, tell her.”
She glares at him. “This is none of your business.”
“It is my business when it’s having a direct effect on my relationship. Tell her.”
She sets her jaw, still looking at him.
Irritated now, I say, “What happened last night? I thought you went to bed before Simon?” We all watched a movie last night. He was noticeably quiet, and he stayed up playing a computer game after we both said we were going to bed. I wasn’t even sure if he slept in the same bed as her.
Eventually, she looks at me. “We talked for a couple of hours last night when he eventually came to bed. And in the end, we decided our marriage is irreparable. We’re going to get a divorce.”
My jaw drops. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’re having enough troubles, and I didn’t want to influence you.”
