“From when we got here, Connor,” I’d said at the time. “You probably walked on the beach. I don’t know. I was busy unpacking our things.”

“I didn’t walk on the beach drunk as a skunk,” he now says, shaking like a leaf. The white couch is devouring him.

“You are screwing with yourself,” I say. “Stop it. Stop it right now.”

My shattered husband sets down his glass. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know at all.”

“You didn’t do anything,” I say. “You couldn’t have. You aren’t that kind of a person, and I wasn’t gone that long. And really, when you get down to it, babe, if you did something to that woman—and there’s no way you could—what did you do with her?”

Connor exhales for the first time since we began the mental trip back to the cabin.

“That’s right,” he says. His tone becomes something close to hopeful. “I couldn’t have done anything with her. I wouldn’t have done anything to her.”

I nod and change the subject.

“How about you take a shower and we go to bed early?” I give him a smile that’s merely an invitation, one in which there is never a need for an RSVP. Not when I am ovulating. Which I am.

“What about the sushi?” he asks.

“You hungry?”

“Not really. Maybe later. Maybe after.”

He catches my smile, and I know he’s with the program. His anxiety is his problem. I’m keeping my focus. Maybe tonight will be the night. Every night that it isn’t is one day closer to it never happening at all. I watch him pad past the dining table to the master bedroom. He’s a drunk, but he’s still attractive to me. I want him inside of me.

I make my way to the kitchen and make some tea from the herbs that I’ve stashed in the cupboard and drink it down, looking over the house: four bedrooms and only two people. I wonder if it is a curse. That my idea of filling the house up with children was ruined by virtue of thinking so far ahead. Planning is for dreamers and fools.

After we have sex and Connor goes off to the kitchen to eat some sushi, I lay there in the bed like I’m an airplane-seat tray, my legs once more in the upright and locked position. I’m trying. I really am. It flashes over me that it will probably work now. Now that we’re not seeing Dr. Y.

That high-priced quack.

Simple and direct is better in any course of action. I was so foolish to think that I had to bring science into the equation. Natural is best. Let nature take its course. I feel that way about my marriage too.

It feels great.

Really it does.

I promise.

CHAPTER FORTY