“Why are you here?” I ask.

“I wanted to talk to you. I caught the first flight out this morning.”

“Give me a minute.” Slowly, I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed because I really need to pee. After I pull on my yoga pants I walk into the bathroom to relieve my close-to-bursting bladder. When I’m washing my hands I look in the mirror.

I do not look good.

My skin is ashen and there are dark circles under my eyes. I brush my teeth and then pull my hair back into a sloppy bun. When I come out of the bathroom Chris is waiting for me.

“Let’s go downstairs.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” he echoes, and follows me out of the room.

“Why were you sleeping?” he asks when we sit down on the couch. “You hardly ever nap during the day.”

“I was sleeping because I’m tired. I’m tired of you shutting me out whenever we hit a rough patch. I’m tired of worrying about whether Daniel is okay.”

Chris flinches, as though the very mention of Daniel’s name has caused him a fresh wave of pain.

“I’m tired of everything, Chris.” I can’t look at him. I’m afraid I’ll start crying again, and I’m tired of doing that, too. Swallowing the lump in my throat and looking at the clock on the wall over his shoulder, I wait for him to say whatever it is he flew home early to say so we can clear the air, once and for all.

“I know I didn’t handle things very well the other night, Claire. I just never expected you to tell me something like that.”

“I didn’t have to tell you at all,” I say.

“Yeah, well. I almost wish you hadn’t.”

Neither of us says anything for a minute, but then we both try to talk at once.

“Go ahead,” he says.

“When I got out of the hospital I told Daniel I couldn’t see him anymore. Even though nothing physical ever happened between us, we came close.”

Chris’s jaw clenches and he looks as if he’d rather hear anything other than the words that are coming out of my mouth.

“But I felt like you were finally going to fight for me instead of letting me slip away. And I was slipping away, Chris. A little more every day.”

“Why did you spend so much time with him?”

He looks as though he might not really want to hear the answer, but he asked, so I tell him the truth. “I was lonely, Chris. Lonely and sad and frustrated. I spent time with him because he gave it to me.” I angle my body toward his. “I wanted you to be the one I turned to, but you weren’t there.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Chris says. “For everything.”

“You were doing what you thought you had to do,” I say. “What you thought was best for this family.”

He shrugs and shakes his head, runs his fingers through his hair. “At what cost?” he asks.

I think I’ve already given him the answer to that question. “I’m sorry, too,” I say.

Chris stares out the window at the backyard and doesn’t say anything for a minute. He turns back around and looks me in the eye. “How close did I come?” he asks. “To losing you.”

“Not as close as you think,” I say, because there are some things that a man never needs to hear.

Chris reaches over and pulls me into his arms. He doesn’t speak, but he strokes my hair and holds me tight, like he’ll never let me go. We stay like that for a long time. And I think to myself that maybe Chris talks to me the loudest when he says nothing at all.

66

claire

We join together at Skip and Elisa’s once again, to celebrate the last day of school. I smile, listening to the kids’ excited voices as they chase each other across the freshly cut grass, reveling in the noise of happy children.

Chris stands beside me, a smile on his face. The golden boy shimmers in the sunshine, the way he once did, and I swear that man’s happiness can light a room.

He turned in his resignation at work this morning. He told me what he wanted to do a few nights ago while we were lying in bed. “I want to form a new company. There’s this guy at work named Seth—he’s a software engineer from the implementation team—and we’ve been talking about it for a while, discussing every possible scenario. We’ve mapped out timelines and gone over the budget a thousand times. I feel like we have a pretty solid business plan.”

“So it would be a partnership?” I asked.

“Yes. Seth’s not very expressive—he’s really more of a head-down programmer—so he would design and create the software and it would be my job to sell it.”

“What about the start-up costs?”

“They’d be fairly low. And we wouldn’t have any overhead, at least at first. We’d work out of our homes. I don’t know if you’ve noticed anything about our bank accounts.”

“I’ve noticed that they seem to have a nice balance in them.” I never stopped economizing. I never changed the money-saving habits I formed when Chris was unemployed. I still shop at discount retailers. I clean the house myself. And I maintain a fairly high volume of freelance assignments. Chris spent next to nothing after he went back to work because his expense account paid for everything when he was on the road. Our financial situation has never been better.

“Enough for us to get by for at least a year, maybe longer,” he said.

“No insurance company is going to cover me individually.”

“We would apply for group health insurance. As long as we have at least two employees, we can do this. In the meantime, we could extend my health insurance benefits like we did when I got laid off. We’d all be covered for eighteen months. It will be expensive, but we’ve included the premiums in the estimation of our operating costs.”

I could hear the excitement in Chris’s voice, but I proceeded cautiously. “A start-up requires a lot of time. Hours upon hours. How do I know we won’t be trading one problem for another? Even if you’re home, you could be too busy.” I thought about the office door being closed all the time. The late nights and weekends spent working.

“I know that. A start-up isn’t easy. And I’m not going to lie. There’s a ton of competition in this market. I’d still have to travel, but not nearly as much. Eventually, we’d hire people to do that. We wouldn’t have to answer to anyone but each other. But I can’t promise you this will work, Claire. It’s a huge gamble. There’s a good chance we’ll fail.”

I gave him my blessing anyway. If Chris didn’t take his career into his own hands, he’d never be free of the possibility of a layoff, or a less than desirable work situation, or a temperamental boss. If we had to economize even further, we would. At least Chris would be working toward something he believed in.

So now we wait and see. Sink or swim. Fingers crossed.

Chris and I find drinks and settle into a couple of empty chairs on the patio. Julia and Justin arrive with their girls. Two months out of rehab, Julia’s sobriety is still tenuous, the thread connecting her to this new, sober life as delicate as gossamer. She relapsed, but just once. She’s thirty-three days sober now, and she fought for every single one of them. I’m praying for thirty-four.

I thought Justin might cut and run, abandon her in her desperate time of need, but he didn’t. After Julia joined AA she told him he was free to go. That if the other woman was who he really wanted, there was no reason for him to stick around. But he did, and I hope that he stays. Her daily affirmations, Justin’s support, and her daughters will help her stay the course, but the decision not to drink will always rest on Julia’s shoulders. I believe she has what it takes.

Bridget can’t be with us tonight because she’s working at the hospital. She does three twelve-hour shifts a week, from 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M., relying on Sebastian to keep his brothers out of harm’s way. Her child care arrangement isn’t ideal, but her boys don’t seem to mind. They moved into a three-bedroom apartment, and Bridget pays the rent, and all other expenses, by herself. She hasn’t heard from Sam in more than a month. It turned out that gambling was more important to him than Bridget and the boys. He didn’t show up for his initial court date after Bridget initiated divorce proceedings, and she hasn’t been able to reach him since. It’s as if he disappeared.