‘We hadn’t been trying at all. Our timing was never right. Vera wanted to have an abortion.’ He took another sip. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘I didn’t want to do it, since it was ours.’

‘But you guys didn’t …’

‘No, but she really wanted to. Maybe that’s what I couldn’t get over. I am a monster,’ he said, scratching at his beard again. ‘I should never have pressured her. I should have driven Vera to the clinic, held her hand, respected what she wanted. But then we lost the baby anyway.’ He blinked once, twice, as if holding back tears. ‘She’s never gotten past it. It happened when she was eighteen weeks. She was only showing a little, but we knew. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen her gain weight. And she looked different. She was breaking out like a teenager, her hair was so damn thick. It was – he was – a boy. The internet said the size of an avocado. I came home right away and took her to the hospital – we were there for hours. And then the recovery. The procedure they make you have, to get all the tissue.’ He clung tightly to his glass. ‘I put her through all that. All for nothing. Sometimes, it feels like it only just happened.’

‘Christ,’ I said, forcing myself to speak, realizing that our faces couldn’t be more than a foot apart. ‘That’s awful.’

‘I wanted to try again, but she said no.’

‘Like never no?’ I asked.

‘How can we now?’ He looked down at his hands, then back up at me. ‘It’s so hard,’ he said.

For a second, I lost the thread of conversation, found it difficult to remember what had been hard, the baby or losing it or not having one again? Or having to disappear, fake his own death? It was all jumbling, jigsaw pieces. Like the puzzles I used to do with my dad, back in Seattle.

‘Before I met her, it was something I always imagined.’

It. I couldn’t place what it was. God, I was drunk.

‘A baby,’ John reminded me. ‘A family.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘A family.’ It was like meeting people at a dinner party, their names floating away and bursting like bubbles. I blinked, trying to focus, my eyelids even heavier than before.

‘I love Vera,’ John said. I could hear a but in there, lodged in his whiskey-soaked words.

‘But sometimes I think all we do is try to make each other people we’re not. It’s pathetic.’

I was suddenly so tired, but I had to stay awake. I had to tell him that I got it, tell him something so true, it could only come out when I was out of my mind like I was.

I would do anything for a family, too.