The day that I told Eric the news was … well, it was complicated. To say the least! It was complicated. But what took over, the second that I said something, alluded to it … was such joy. Such happiness. For him and me. Of the many ways to say “I love you” … a child may be the most perfect of them all … (Beat.) It was, well … it was how I always imagined it was going to be, when it finally happened … and it did happen. Finally. In all of those years … all those demeaning and dehumanizing tests that he and I went through—egg counts and the blood draws and the sperm samples—through all of that, I never gave up hope for it to happen. I never gave up on us. And I know he did, know it for a fact—Eric did—but that’s alright, I can understand it and accept it … as a man, as a “man of color” (as he will always point out in times like those) … it’s different for him. I know it and I embrace it. He gave up. He decided it would never happen for us and I think—I don’t know for sure, I honestly do not—but I believe that he may have even been … there was a year or so there in our marriage where I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he was with another woman, or more than one … an affair, a mistake, an escort … none of it would’ve shocked me. He was taking more and more work out of town, or work that took him out of town—“business trips,” as they love to call them—and I could feel something in the air. That … good between us … slowly evaporating … and I resolved to fix it. To mend that. To find a way out of a bad situation. (Beat.) And I did. (Beat.) I don’t want to mislead you … Eric and I continued to make love when time allowed, or when it felt like we should—husbands and wives know those moments, people in most relationships do … but man and wife, they are so so conscious of that moment … when they should be making love. Even if it’s the most perfunctory experience, we know when we need to touch our partners and make them feel as if we are still interested and involved … it just comes with the territory. And so Eric and I would do that—once a week, sometimes more, usually less—moments of touching or intercourse, something simple and oral. Whatever it took. To keep up the appearance of lust because that’s what it was, really … the appearance of it. I mean, there was certainly still love there … to this day … I love him, and I would do anything to keep us together. Anything, and I have done that … so much … gone so far … and I would do it all again, every step I’ve taken … every ill that I’ve committed … whatever you or anyone else would call illegal or unnatural or just plain … wrong, I’d do a thousand times over. To have what I have in my life today. (Beat.) I don’t feel I’m alone in that … feeling that way, about my life … most people I know have strung together so many little crimes, dozens and dozens of tiny deceits … to live in the place that they do, with the person that they live with; and perhaps I’m kidding myself, trying to feel better about what I did and helping myself to sleep at night … but I don’t think so … I think this is “life” … what I’ve done, right here. You act or you don’t act. You do something or you don’t. There is only today. There is only tomorrow. Yesterday is just a puff of smoke … without recourse, without punishment or remorse … am I crazy to think that? (Beat.) Don’t answer me … I don’t think I really wanna know the truth about that one. Not about that …