I think about his exceptionally neat room, the precision of how he’s arranged it all. I think about the things Dinah mentioned earlier.

Maybe we do need to talk.

“Gill? You okay?” Oliver comes into the room, turns on the light. I hadn’t even noticed how dark it was in here, and now I blink like a mole at Oliver standing in the doorway.

“Oliver—” I swivel the laptop screen towards him. “Does this—does any of this remind you of Sam?”

He looks at the article headline, then back at me, surprised. But then he takes a seat and reads through it. He frowns at me.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Where did this come from?”
I tell him about Dinah’s call earlier.

“At first I thought…well, I thought she was just being alarmist.” I keep my voice down, conscious of Sam in the next room. “Sam’s been going through so much, and everyone can be a little, you know, a little odd in their own ways. But now that I’ve started reading about it…I don’t know. A lot of it reminds me of him.”

“I figured he was just a perfectionist,” Oliver says. “I mean, have you seen his room? Hospital corners, Gill.” He glances at the screen again. “Half a million kids in the United States have this?”

“Apparently.” I close the lid. But is Sam one of them?

Oliver looks at me.

“So…what are you going to do? You think you should talk to him about it?”

Despite the “truce” Oliver extracted from me earlier, this just rankles me.

“Why do you say that like it’s just up to me to do something?” I say. “What about you?”

Oliver looks incredulous.

“You want me to talk to him about this?”

I shrug. “Well, you’re the guy. He likes you. It’s less embarrassing than talking to me.” I look over at the way my husband’s frowning, almost recoiling. “Why does it always have to be me?” I burst out.

Oliver blinks at me.

“Why does what always have to be you?”

“You always leave me to fix things!” I say. I’m thinking of last night, of his response to the whole IVF conversation. And of course it’s not just that. If there’s ever anything to be smoothed over with our relatives—with my mom, or Oliver’s mom even—or with our friends, the occasional tensions and awkwardnesses that crop up, Oliver always somehow sidesteps his way out of it. Literally or figuratively, he finds a way to leave the room.

“When things get awkward,” I say, “you check out. You just leave me to handle them.”