“Well… ” she tried, her voice shaking. Hadn’t she made a lot of sense to herself before, when she was figuring this out? “Since you didn’t seem to realize they were your children, I thought I’d let you choose them. I tried a couple of times, then chickened out. But I thought we seemed to be headed in the same direction this time, wanting the same things and all. And I thought you might be a little upset at first, but I really thought you’d be happy to find out they’re—”

“Good God,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t you know there’s a huge difference between accepting them because they’re part of the deal and wanting them because… And you’re going to do a study on ethics. Leigh, it isn’t ethical to keep information like that a secret.”

“I know, sort of. But that’s what makes ethics confusing and complex. Being dishonest is unethical, unless it’s the lesser evil. Like, is it more ethical not to name the father of my sons than to name someone who would hurt them?”

“Why would I hurt them?” he asked, aghast. “Haven’t I been pretty good with them? Good to them? Without even knowing—”

“But I needed to know you again. What if you didn’t want them?” she said, her voice so low he had to strain to hear. “What if you didn’t want me? Or me with them?”

He only pursed his lips tighter. “Why couldn’t you just tell me the truth? Why didn’t you leave me a message that you were about to give birth? If not that, why didn’t you write, call, something—to let me know I was a father?”

“I didn’t want to bother you. You said you didn’t want to be a father. I left because you said that wasn’t in your game plan. You said, ‘Go. We’re just from two different worlds.’”

“Leigh,” he said as patiently as he could, “men always say stuff like that. It doesn’t mean that much. A guy says something like that, and then his wife gets pregnant and you’d think he invented pregnancy.”

“I don’t know anything about guys and what they say and what they mean.”