He’d ordered poached salmon for both of them, but Odilie barely touched hers. It was their first meal without the baby in months. You have to stop calling her the baby. She’s nearly three years old, she would whine to him. He hadn’t wanted kids. That had been an agreement when they got married, along with many other concessions, his and hers.

And now she had revealed that she was pregnant with a second.

Back then, when they had made that initial agreement, she was besotted with him. All he had to do was touch her lightly, on the arm, on the back, and she would instantly swoon. The idea of bringing anyone else into their little dyad had seemed foreign, a disturbance to their already carefully controlled relationship. He was beginning to learn, though, that things change. That as eager and easy a woman can seem in the beginning of a relationship, that isn’t the bare-bones reality. His wife wanted a kid. She got her kid. His wife wanted another kid. She got another kid. Through no fault of his own. Sometimes he suspected she had intentionally stopped taking her birth control.

“Don’t you like me this way, starved and weak, like a little fawn? Even pregnant?” She reflexively touched her stomach, where she wasn’t even showing yet, taking a sip of sparkling water. It was the first thing he’d heard her say; she’d been talking, those pillowy lips of hers opening and shutting like a ventriloquist’s doll. But this was the only phrase of hers that wormed its way into his ear, as if the rest of her speech were a hiss, lost in the burble of their fellow diners.

“Sure. I wouldn’t want you regressing to a plump little townie. But you’re becoming emaciated. That’s not exactly in vogue right now, is it?” He hadn’t noticed any weight loss, if he were to be honest. But these days he liked needling her, reminding her what his money had turned her into. What she used to be. How she would still be toiling in some small-town dreary office if it weren’t for him. It was ugly behavior; he knew that. But after what he’d discovered, he couldn’t help himself.