At that point Devlin was telling himself that he was beginning to learn how to control her. The trick was in not losing his temper—and this time he held on to it because he was able to read her body language, the bowed head, averted eyes—and heard, in the very softness of her voice, that something ugly was coming. Without another word, he walked out of the house and went to work. When she called to find out what had happened to him, he kept his voice flat, dead calm. It made her nervous, he had learned, and made her open up, even tell the truth for a little while, for a change.

And then she would beg him not to give up on her. She would change, she promised—she could, with his help. “Please don’t throw me back!” She’d want sex then, too. After he’d known her six months, he believed that she was going through a process that was more than simply an attempt to manipulate him. “Love me good,” she would plead. “Love me good!” She was more excited at those times, needing to be held. She would whisper she loved him, and in the sense that he knew something was wrong with her, he believed it.

Even after the attention-getting became atrocious, after she’d told him that he wasn’t the best she’d ever had in bed, after she’d announced she wasn’t sure she could be faithful for life, he held hope—what he told himself was hope. His ego was at stake: he told himself he could solve her problems. They’d been married two years and he’d never really stopped salving his ego with other women, he might not have ever been truly, completely sober, but he still held that stupid, vain hope. The hardest part about remembering now was his shame and guilt. Thinking about that period of his life, Devlin wanted to race on to the last atrocity, the third abortion. He had wanted that child.…

The simple truth was that he shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and he had known it all along!