“Of course! Why would you ask that?”

“I don’t know,” Megan said. “You sounded uncomfortable when I asked about him.”

Charlene laughed. “Sorry. This is an odd time. I have no job, no place of my own, no idea what’s coming next. The only home I have is Michael’s house in Palo Alto. It shouldn’t be such an adjustment. But it is.”

“I bet you feel dependent for the first time in your life,” Megan suggested.

“Maybe that’s it,” she said. But that wasn’t it. She and Michael were fighting. They’d had a standoff. About marriage, of all things.

* * *

Charley Hempstead met Michael Quincy when she was twenty-two and he was thirty-two. It was supposed to be a rebound fling, not a twenty-two-year love affair. Charley had been through quite a lot by that time in her young life—she’d had a baby out of wedlock at seventeen and had given her up for adoption, was attending college in California—as far away from her mother as she could get—and been through a string of boyfriends, all useless college boys.

Michael hadn’t fared much better. When they met he was separated from his wife of six years and it was a bitter parting, the divorce promising to be quite messy. He was a professor of political science and had just escaped a shallow, loveless, acrimonious marriage. On the one hand, he was relieved there were no children to suffer through the divorce, but on the other, he worried he might never be a father. He had wanted children. His wife had not.

Both of them embarked on their relationship thinking it would probably be a mere comfortable blip on the radar, a placeholder until they could heal and regain their strength. But they were derailed by passion. Michael, the handsome young professor who all the coeds crushed on, fell in love with Charley. And Charley fell for him. They were living together in a small apartment in Berkeley within a few months. They talked, debated, read and made love constantly. They didn’t marry—at first because of the complications of Michael’s divorce and later because Michael was a little soured on marriage and didn’t want to spoil the relationship they had. Charley, if she was honest with herself, wanted to be different. Modern. And she didn’t mind pissing off her mother. The fact that Charley became pregnant accidentally a few years later changed very little. By then, Michael’s divorce was final, the settlement done, and he bought a small but fashionable home in Palo Alto, a place for them to raise their child. It was the `90s—people cohabitated and had children together all the time; women even had them alone without suffering much recrimination. So, for Michael, who had feared he might never have a child, and Charley, who had been forced to give one up, the birth of Eric brought much happiness.