The dog loved Milano’s as much as Kate.

Sighing, Andrew plucked a slice from the box. “Buttons. You want some pizza?”

The old dog bounded into the kitchen, nails skittering on the tile. He couldn’t pull up fast enough and skidded into a cabinet. Kate nearly choked on her Pepsi.

“We couldn’t have had a child that would end up being more like you,” Andrew said.

“Lucky for that unborn child.”

Not being able to have children had long since ceased being a sore spot for them. They’d gone from disappointment to sadness, grim acceptance to now, where it was just a simple fact of life. No sense bemoaning and gnashing teeth over what could have been. Besides, Kate couldn’t imagine what it would be like taking care of a child now when she could barely take care of herself. That would have been just one more very big thing on Andrew’s already full plate.

Andrew plopped next to her, holding pizza and a beer. He hit the Mute button on the TV remote. There was a commercial for a Jean Arthur retrospective.

Kate wanted to wolf down the slice, but forced herself to nibble. Her internal mechanisms did not take kindly to massive food intake.

“How was work?” she asked.

He popped open the beer. Foam ran down the sides of the can onto his lap. He just shook his head, sucking up as much as he could.

“I came, I saw, I left,” he said. “It was a meeting kind of day, which means I got nothing done.”

“Can’t you just tell them you have real work to do and blow off those meetings?”

“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, honey, but in corporate America, accomplishing nothing due to a solid slate of meetings is classified as a job well done.”

She snatched a stray cucumber from his salad and popped it in her mouth. “I’d go crazy in a place like that. There’s no way I’d be able to keep my mouth shut.”

“Which is why Fate glimpsed your future and said, ‘Hmm, I better give this chick something that’ll keep her from ever trying to work with people. I know, I’ll strike her down with anything I can scrounge up that’s incurable, therefore maintaining the careful balance between progress and stagnancy we’ve worked so hard to imbue in this thing we call business.’”

Kate chuckled. “Then I thank Fate for saving us both,” she said.

When Andrew shifted to put his beer on the coffee table, she winced.

“What hurts most?” he asked.

He’d long ago learned never to simply ask what hurt. Everything hurt, all the time. It was easier to explain which body part had taken the spotlight for the moment.

“My knees are killing me.”

He pulled the blanket away to inspect the swollen melons she called knees. “I can get some frozen peas.”