Stubborn as he could be, Antonio was also respectful. That’s why he’d backed off when Maddy stopped writing.

“I was thinking all kinds of things,” he went on. “If I had been maybe too closed and too certain. But at the end I had to give it up. You did not want to see me. It was very painful.” In a low flat voice he added: “I was in love with you, you know.” I said nothing and he hurried on. “But I guess the part of me that wanted to get on with my career and not look to the left or to the right—that part was happy to give up.”

I sat in stupefied silence. What had I said to Antonio?

“What you mean is, you don’t want to have a child with me.” I waited for him to touch or contradict me.

He might have reached for me. He might have tried to touch me. He might have said other things that were lost to me now. No copy was kept of the past and what had gone on there. It was possible I had said something else, something cold and desperate and calculated to wound. Something I did not mean.

“So why should I want your baby?”

Or: “What makes you think I’m going to keep your baby?”

Or even: “I want a baby, Antonio, but I don’t want yours.”

He was playing with the saltshaker, capsizing and righting it in his long, lean fingers. His hands used to cover my face and slide apart so he could kiss me. The dark red privacy, the thrill of exposure. Being so much taller, he had to lean down to do it. I never experienced our difference in height as inequality; rather, it was a gap that had to be crossed, intensifying what passed between us. The tipping of the saltshaker was maddening. I needed stillness. I needed to think. I needed to think and I could not bear to think, because alive in the room with us and coursing like a toxin through me was a monstrous idea: I had deprived Maddy of a father.

That potent and useless construction: could have. I could have answered Antonio’s phone calls. I could have tolerated his misgivings. Shocked and temporarily cold-hearted, he could have been given time; he could have been persuaded. If Antonio could have been persuaded, then Antonio and I could have stayed together. If Antonio and I had stayed together, then Antonio would have been Maddy’s father. I could not look at him or speak. I hated him for the chance I had taken with our lives and, when I finally met his eyes, I hated the knowledge in them that was curdling into pity.