“You know. We both know.” He stopped, then drew in a breath to steady himself. “I’m sorry I hit you. I don’t want it to end this way. However, it has. I’d better go. If I stay—I could hit you again. I—” He looked around the room blindly. “There was a moment—in Bosnia—when I thought… Never mind that. Just don’t talk about Marianne in that way. You have no children. You can’t understand. All that joy and guilt and remorse. Trying so hard, feeling you’ve never done enough. I did have to work, you know.” He gave her a pained glance. “No doubt Helen left out that part of the equation. But I did have to support a child and wife. I take photographs. Of wars. You can’t do that nine to five and come home for dinner every night. She did know that when she married me. When Marianne was born, we did make plans. Where I should go, when I would return. How I could ration out my life. Meet my responsibilities as a father. According to Helen, the result was failure, and the failure was entirely mine, of course. I might have hoped—” He hesitated. “I might have hoped that you would see it differently. It doesn’t matter. You listened to my ex-wife and you judged me. Now I understand what happened last night. I’ll go. There’s no point in protracting this. It’s painful for both of us.”

“I wanted your baby.” Gini gave a cry; she made a small rushing movement toward him, then stopped. “Oh, Pascal—couldn’t you see? Couldn’t you guess? It began in Bosnia, in Mostar maybe. Because I loved you so much, and we saw so much death.” Her voice wavered and her face contracted. “I knew it was impractical. I could see you didn’t want it. But it just took hold of me, and I couldn’t get free. I wanted your baby so much, I couldn’t think of anything else.”

There was a silence. He had listened to this stumbling confession intently, with a pale, set face. As she came to its end, he gave a small gesture of the hands, an eloquent gesture, as if he were about to relinquish something he valued very much.

“I see.” His face became closed. “That was what you felt. Why couldn’t you bring yourself to tell me?”

“Why? Because I was too proud. Because I didn’t want to have to persuade you. Because that kind of decision has to be made by two people, not one—and it ought to be made joyfully. All that—”

Her voice broke. She began to speak again, and then gradually she realized that although she was pouring out to him her strongest feelings, emotions that had been dammed up for months, and although her confession seemed to move him, there was no relenting on his part, and no response.

She came to a faltering halt. He continued to look at her for a moment afterward, then gave a sigh.