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“I get that now. But how do I fix it?”
“You can start with telling me why you had an affair with Deidre.”
“It wasn’t an affair. I spent two nights with her five years ago. I told you it was a mistake and I’m sorry that it ever happened.”
“Tell me why you had the affair,” she repeated, clasping her hands tightly in her lap, her coffee cooling in front of her, her stomach threatening to reject the bite of muffin she had swallowed.
Aidan sighed, looked up at the ceiling, then back at her. “I doubt you realized what was really going on when we started trying for a baby. Our every moment together was taken over with having sex at the right time, whether or not you were pregnant, whether or not there was a physical reason why we couldn’t have a baby. I felt as if I was a cog in a wheel, a person whose only function was to produce enough sperm at the allotted time to get you pregnant. It was awful.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I tried to a couple of times, but you always seemed so preoccupied, I felt as if you weren’t listening. There never seemed to be a time when we could stop and look at what we were doing to each other. The three years we were married before we started getting involved in fertility testing, when we thought we could have a child easily were good, but then when we realized that we had to seek help everything seemed to change. We didn’t go anywhere together except for some appointment or other. Instead of holding you in my arms and talking about you and me, and how much we loved each other, we talked about when you’d probably ovulate again. I knew the inside of the fertility clinic waiting room in more detail than I did our living room.”
“I’ve never heard you talk like this before. I had no idea that you felt so…pressured by all of it.”
“Didn’t you feel that way?” he asked.
“At times, yes. But I believed, in the end, we’d have a child.”
“Well, that’s where you and I saw it differently. The longer it went on, the less I believed that we’d succeed. I’m not blaming anyone or anything. I just didn’t feel the whole thing was going to work, and I didn’t know how to say that without upsetting you.”
“So you went away on business, saw an opportunity—”
“Grace, don’t say it like that. It wasn’t that I saw an opportunity. I was…confused…lonely. The days I spent with Deidre were wrong and I felt terrible about it, but she listened to me. We actually talked about what was going on in the world. About politics. We…just…talked.” He looked across the table at her, his eyes dark, his face pale. “And as stupid as that sounds, I needed someone to hear me.”
Grace searched his face. He was telling her the truth. A truth she didn’t want to hear. Had she been that unaware of him and what he needed? “I thought you were as involved as I was in getting pregnant. You never told me you weren’t.”
“How could I let you down like that? When all the testing started, I believed it would work out, and we’d have a baby. But as time went on, and I realized it probably wouldn’t work, I didn’t know how to tell you what I was feeling without adding to your concerns. You wanted a baby so badly, honey, I felt I had no choice but to continue no matter how I was feeling about it.”
“All those months you went along with trying for a child because you felt you couldn’t disappoint me?”
“I did. You were so much more committed than I was. I began to think that I didn’t want it as much as you did. You talked about it all the time. I wanted to have the old Grace back. The one who liked to spend a morning reading the papers in bed, having sex simply for the fun of it, going for a walk without checking the clock or talking about the latest test results.”
