quite understand, her anger, no matter the cause, always provoked his own.
“About what?”
“About this dismissal of my idea of having kids,” said Rachel. “And what it means for us, and the future.” She paused and let the threat hang over them. “It’s too big for you to shut down with a word.”
He gave a curt nod, and, with a tight face, his wife stepped back and pulled the door shut.
It was impossible, what Rachel was doing to him. It wasn’t fair. No matter which way he looked at it, he was the bad guy, and yet somehow, in spite of everything, he was the one who had kept faith with what they had promised one another. It didn’t matter how many women he’d slept with here or there since they’d been married. They had promised the rest of their lives to each other alone. She was the cheater.
Now Rachel wanted a different future, and without a baby, he wasn’t in it. He could already see how it would go. For her, the future was children. But children would be the end of their relationship, the end of his writing, the end of his days alone. Children were like a plague upon the Earth, eating up everybody’s time and freedom.
And then he knew what was going to happen in the novel.
* * *
Owen had always thought lust was the most powerful fuel he’d ever find for his writing, but it turned out that anger at Rachel left everything else in its wake. Once he’d started with the new direction for his story, his fingers could hardly keep pace with his ideas. The ire that had kindled the plot burned itself up in an ecstasy of absorption, as all his old distractions receded. He was pleased with what he’d accomplished, so pleased that after days of working almost non-stop, almost without thinking about the rest of his life, he’d brought the first section of his new novel to Rachel to read with a bursting kind of pride and excitement.
She accepted the pages with a show of reluctance that reminded him they were in a fight. “So this is why you’ve been too busy to talk,” she said.
“I guess you could say that.” He hadn’t been putting her off so much as forgetting about her in an all-consuming creative fog. In the meantime, she’d been spending more evenings out with friends and, when she was home, having long phone calls with old confidantes from out-of-town. But if she’d wanted him to notice or comment on her new independence, he’d disappointed her.
She sat on the couch with a frown of forbearance and told him to go do something else. “I don’t want you to watch me,” she said. “I’m not in the mood to explain my every fleeting thought.”
Owen grabbed his keys, but though he had energy to burn, he was too impatient to drive to the rowing club. Instead, he went outside and paced the streets near their home, wondering and worrying what Rachel’s keen intellect would make of his newest project.
He came back just as she was turning over the last page of what he’d given her, everything he’d written in the past week. She tapped the pages against the coffee table, shuffling the edges flat.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “And horrible.”
“Horrible?” He tried to read her expression. The new story was already more sprawling with characters and less ornate in its prose than his other books, but he’d expected her—his best and most faithful cheerleader—to be excited by the sheer drama and ambition of its plot.
“Well, I suppose this is your way of telling me you’re not going to change your mind,” she said. “Millions of kids dying in a pandemic.” She pressed her lips together and then sighed. Her fingers with their pale pink polish drummed against the table.
Owen put a hand to his forehead, grimacing. He felt like a cardboard cut-out of a man. He’d lost himself in the story somewhere along the way, which he supposed was both a good thing and a bad thing. “You’re much smarter than I am, Rachel.”
She brushed past the concession with nothing more than a raised eyebrow. “I know.” She lowered her face, which was starting to flush. He thought it was possible she was about to cry, and he wondered with a sudden panic if this was going to be the moment when everything changed. The moment when he truly failed her—the final treachery after a hundred smaller betrayals.
He reached out and