James sighs. “It gives me immense satisfaction to think it was just you, but unless you’re some kind of snake charmer for penises, it wasn’t just you.”
Ilena smiles weakly. “That’d be a résumé builder, wouldn’t it?”
“Some doors would burst wide open.”
“Touché.” Ilena is reminded of how much she’d always liked James. “And yet the door on you two, I closed that.” She presses a hand to her stomach. “Me and the singleton.”
“Why are you asking, Ilena? What is all this for?”
“Last night you said—”
“A lot of things I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t the right moment.”
“Maybe not, but sometimes we can’t always wait for the right moment. We have to make the right moment.”
“I appreciate you trying to excuse my behavior, but I was in the wrong. The right moment was months ago. But I was scared. I waited, and, well, I—”
“Ate some bad sushi the day of our wedding.”
“Not exactly.”
“I figured.”
James holds Ilena’s gaze. “For the record, Felix wants the baby. He’s always wanted to be a dad. I shouldn’t have suggested he wasn’t sure about that part.”
“Then the part he wasn’t sure about was me.” Ilena’s throat goes dry as this world holds up a mirror to the one she left.
Before Jonah had brought up having children, she hadn’t really considered it. Being a mom meant risking becoming her mom, creating a family of unceasing disappointment. But Jonah—the Jonah who bought street performers’ CDs and made out with her inJohn Harvard’s lap and would have plastered their home with images of cats in glasses and sunsets and rainbows touting “If plan A fails, there are twenty-five more letters”—thatJonah would have made sure Ilena was never her mom and would never havereason to be. That’s why she’d agreed. She’d wanted to do this with Jonah. She still does. She thought he’d missed all those appointments at the fertility clinic because he wasn’t sure he wanted to be a dad anymore. But maybe it’s the same, maybe the part he wasn’t sure about was her.
An ache comes from deep within her body. “Felix always wanted to be a dad. But he could have been a dad with someone else. Someone he actually loved.”
James sets down his coffee. “Is that a question?”
“It’s a statement. We’re not in love.” She tries to absorb the warmth of her tea, but it’s already fading. “He’s not in love with me any more than I’m in love with him.”
“But you knew that going in. What’s changed?”
She owes him a truthful answer, so she gives it. “What’s changed is wanting it, wanting to be in love. And wanting Felix to have the same.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Once again, Jonah is before her, and the warmth the tea denied her comes, flooding her veins, warming her cheeks, swelling her heart. “I have no idea, but I’m working on it.”
“Good.”
41
Mallory
Monday Afternoon
Four DaysAfterthe Outing
Noreen Parra is framing you for murder.
“Ms. Latham?”
Mallory sits on the couch in her office, trying to act normal despite the policeman across from her (male, late twenties, underwear-model fit), Officer Middlebury to her right, and her father by her desk. On the cushion beside her, Aubrey’s index finger digs a trench into her palm. “Yes?” Mallory says.
