Chương 1
"The divorce folder slipped from my hand when I saw Alina at the end of the courthouse hallway with one hand resting on a belly that could only belong to a woman seven months pregnant.
For a second, neither of us moved.
Papers slid across the polished floor between strangers' shoes, and a man carrying a briefcase stepped around them without looking at me.
Alina stopped beside a drinking fountain and pulled her coat closed, which was useless because there was no hiding what I had already seen.
Fourteen years of marriage had taught me the shape of her body in every season of her life.
I knew the way she carried stress in her shoulders, the way she gained weight first in her face, the way she stood with one hip slightly higher when her back hurt.
This was not weight.
This was a baby.
"Marcus."
She said my name softly, as if I were the one who might break.
I crouched to gather the papers because doing something with my hands seemed preferable to standing there staring at my pregnant wife on the morning we were supposed to end our marriage.
One page had skidded beneath the bench.
I reached for it twice and missed.
"Leave it," Alina said.
"I've got it."
"Marcus."
"I said I've got it."
A woman sitting nearby looked up from her phone.
That was enough to make me lower my voice.
I retrieved the page, stood, shoved everything into the folder without checking the order, and looked at Alina again.
Her hair was shorter than when I had last seen her.
That registered for no useful reason.
She had cut maybe four inches off.
There were faint shadows beneath her eyes, and she wore the dark green scarf my sister had given her three Christmases ago, back when my sister still believed Alina and I were one of those couples who had somehow figured marriage out.
My eyes dropped again.
Alina covered her stomach with both hands.
"You're pregnant."
"Yes."
The word landed with almost no sound.
"How pregnant?"
She glanced toward the hearing-room doors.
"Marcus."
"How pregnant?"
"Thirty-one weeks."
I stared at her.
I knew enough arithmetic to wish I didn't.
Thirty-one weeks reached backward through the months and landed dangerously close to a night I had spent half a year pretending had meant nothing.
"No."
Her eyebrows tightened.
"No what?"
I opened my mouth and discovered I had no idea.
No, the dates were wrong.
No, she could not have kept this from me.
No, I had not spent months paying lawyers to dismantle a marriage while my wife was carrying a child who might be mine.
The courthouse continued around us with the insulting normality of every public place where someone's private life is collapsing.
A deputy laughed at something another deputy said.
An elevator chimed.
Somewhere behind the double doors, a clerk called a name that sounded like Peterson.
Alina shifted her weight and pressed one hand against the small of her back.
That ordinary movement frightened me more than her stomach had.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Her face changed.
Not much.
With Alina, it was rarely much.
Her mouth flattened, and she looked past me toward the windows.
"You asked for a divorce."
"That isn't an answer."
"It's part of one."
"You're thirty-one weeks pregnant."
"I know."
"And you didn't think that was information I should have?"
She gave me a look I remembered from our marriage, usually reserved for moments when I had said something so unfair that she needed a few seconds to decide whether correcting me was worth the effort.
"I thought you had made your position fairly clear."
"My position about our marriage."
"Yes."
"This is different."
"Is it?"
I almost raised my voice again.
Instead I squeezed the folder until the cardboard bent under my thumb.
"Is the baby mine?"
The question came out quieter than everything before it.
Alina looked directly at me.
I had expected anger.
I might even have preferred it.
Instead, something in her expression softened, and that made my stomach turn.
Before she answered, the hearing-room door opened.
"Marcus Reed and Alina Reed?"
A clerk stood there holding a clipboard.
Neither of us responded.
She checked the page.
"Reed?"
"Yes," Alina said.
The clerk nodded toward the room.
"We're ready for you."
I didn't move.
Alina took one step forward.
"Wait."
She stopped.
The clerk looked from her to me and then, with the practiced indifference of someone who had seen thousands of marriages arrive at their administrative endings, said, "I'll give you a minute."
The door shut.
I turned to Alina.
"Answer me."
She swallowed.
"Not here."
"You've had seven months to pick somewhere else."
That hurt her.
I saw it immediately.
Some ugly part of me was glad.
Then I hated myself for being glad.
Alina reached into her purse and removed a folded tissue.
She didn't cry.
She only twisted it once around her fingers.
"You really want to do this in a courthouse hallway?"
"I want to know whether I'm about to divorce a woman who's carrying my child."
"You're not about to divorce me."
I stared at her.
She took a breath.
"I asked my attorney to request a continuance."
"What?"
"I can't do this today."
"Because you're pregnant?"
"Because I shouldn't have come."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know what you asked."
"Then answer it."
She looked down at the tissue in her hand.
"According to the dates, yes."
The hallway seemed to narrow around us.
"According to the dates?"
"Marcus, please."
"What does that mean?"
"It means exactly what it sounds like."
"No, it sounds like something a person says when there's another possibility."
She closed her eyes briefly.
That was when fear arrived.
Until then, I had been angry, confused, humiliated, and shocked.
Fear was colder.
It moved through me without asking permission.
"Is there another possibility?"
May you like
Alina looked toward the hearing-room door.
"Not the way you're thinking."
