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"Is that where they use a turkey baster?"
She gave a watery laugh. "Not quite, but that's the general idea."
"I guess it didn't work." His voice was heavy with sympathy.
"No, it did. I got pregnant after the first attempt."
She heard him suck in a breath, knowing that there was no happy ending to this story.
"I was thrilled, and Gregory seemed to be to. Sure, I sensed he was acting distant, but I figured most of that was on me. I was so obsessed with getting pregnant and feeling so down on myself, I wasn't there for him like I was before. But still, I felt like we were a team, we were on this mission together. And now we were going to have a baby! We went through a rough patch, but it would all be worth it in the end."
"I was ten weeks pregnant when I found an unfamiliar pair of women's underwear in Gregory’s gym bag."
JT's expression mirrored the revulsion she felt every time she allowed the memory back into her consciousness. "He fucked her in the bed you shared?"
"To this day, he maintains that he never had sex with Angela in our house while we were still married. He told me, and I quote, 'she has too much respect for you to come into your house.' Because sharing a dick is okay, but I draw the line at fucking in your house?"
"A woman has to have morals."
She gave him a little smile. "Anyway, when I confronted him with the underwear, he hemmed and hawed and finally admitted that yes, he'd been unfaithful. Even though I'd always had my suspicions about Angela and how chummy they were at work, he flat-out denied that it was her. He claimed it was only one time, with a random woman he'd picked up a couple of weekends before when I'd come up here to visit my mom and tell her about the baby. He promised it would never happen again and said he'd do whatever it took to regain my trust.
"Even though I knew in my bones he was lying, I went along with it. I was so desperate to keep our life together, I would have done anything."
Shame, acrid and bitter, burned at the back of her throat as she remembered the weeks that followed. "A few days after that I hacked into his phone, and found out that I was right, it had been Angela all along. There were messages that went back over a year and a half."
"So almost the entire time..."
She nodded. "Almost the entire time we were trying to have a baby, he was fucking another woman, telling her she was the love of his life. I was so tempted to forward everything to the hospital employee listserv."
"But you didn't."
She shook her head. "No. And I didn't kick him out, even then." She cringed now, as she told JT how she had begged Gregory to love her, begged him to end it with Angela so they could raise their baby together. How she had frequent, desperate sex with him, because if she didn't put out he would go to Angela. But he went to her anyway.
"He promised to end it with her, and like an idiot, I believed him."
Or tried to, anyway. Because after all the lies, how could she really believe anything he said?
JT said as much. Then, softly, "What happened to the baby?"
"I had a miscarriage at thirteen weeks," she said. Tears flowed freely now as she remembered the violent cramping, the blood rushing between her legs. No No No—a litany ringing in her head as she tried to deny the reality of what was happening.
Then the doctor's grim face as he told her he couldn't find a heartbeat.
"Oh, honey."
"I remember thinking Gregory didn't look so much sad as resigned. That's when I knew he was leaving me."
JT handed her some napkins and released one of her hands so he could curve his fingers around the back of her neck. "I'm so sorry."
She wiped her nose and blotted her eyes. "He told me it was a blessing," her words caught on a sob. "He said since he didn't want to be married to me anymore, this would make things easier."
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her onto his lap. She buried her face against his chest and breathed him in.
"I don't understand," he said after a little while. "Why would he go through all of that if he was planning to leave you?"
"I don't know if he was planning to leave me. Not as long as he could get away with it. But when I asked him that same question, he told me it was because I wanted a baby so much, he could at least give me that before he left."
The muscles of his chest stiffened against her cheek. "Like the baby would be some kind of parting gift? 'Thanks for the memories! Now I'll just leave you with his kid to raise on your own!'"
