She’s in the bathroom a very long time. I know why. It kills me every time Kristen goes through the ritual after we have sex. Baby-making sex. It’s taken over everything in our lives, and I don’t know how to stop it. I drink more than I should to cope, but it doesn’t help. It’s as if Kristen is on a tiny raft in the middle of the Pacific, and I can’t reach her to get her back into the boat. She wouldn’t take my hand anyway. She wants to put some of the blame, maybe most of it, on me. That I’m the reason why we don’t have a son or a daughter.

I know full well that I’m not the problem. There’s nothing wrong with me. I can’t say that to her, though. It would crush her.

So I let her sling the poisoned darts and steel-tipped arrows when she feels the need. She told me one time that my underwear needed to be looser. That I sleep too hot. That my balls didn’t descend as far as they should. There’s not a damn thing wrong with my nut sack, but I let that go. I let all of it go because Kristen, as it turns out, is the love of my life. So I do what she says. I do it when she says. If she wants me to come into a tube normally used for men about to go on chemo and wanting to bank their seed, then fine. I’ll watch some porn and take care of business.

She comes out of the bathroom, and I can see she’s been crying.

“Oh, baby,” I say, though the word’s a bad choice. “I was feeling it today too. I thought we had this.”

Kristen melts in my arms. She doesn’t let go very often. This time is different. She’s sobbing, a messy kind of crying, and I hold her as tightly as I can. I tell her that she and I will be fine. I bring up for the umpteenth time that if we can’t have a family biologically, we can adopt.

“I want our child to be part of us,” she says. “I know it sounds terrible, but that’s how I really feel, Connor. I don’t want to raise someone else’s kid and always know that he or she wasn’t really a part of either one of us. It’s like babysitting for eighteen years and then getting kicked to the curb when the real parents come home.”

“It isn’t like that,” I say.

Her blue eyes are framed in red. “I’ve seen it. At the law office. On TV. Everywhere. The grass is always greener to these adopted kids.”

“Not all of them,” I tell her.