“I can’t believe you would keep this from me,” he said, without preamble. “Something so big. A whole job. You had a whole secret job, and you never told me about it.”

He said had, and the tense made her a little bit nervous. “I thought you’d be mad,” she said in the world’s tiniest voice. “I thought you wouldn’t support it.”

“I don’t support it, Lu. I don’t. I am mad.”

A flame of self-righteousness licked up at her. “I knew it.”

“Can you blame me? Can you blame me, Lu? We had an agreement. For four years, ever since Sebastian was a baby, we’ve had an agreement. I would do that”—he gestured toward his scrubs, and maybe toward a hospital filled with unseen patients a great distance away—“and you would do this.”

“By this,” she said, “I suppose you mean every single thing that has to do with the care of the boys.”

He sighed: he was exasperated. “That was the deal, Lu. I’m sorry you’re sad your life isn’t the perfect fantasy you’ve created in your blog, but no one’s life is perfect. We had an agreement. We agreed that it was best for the boys to be raised by a parent. Don’t you think I would like more time with the boys? Don’t you think I would love the luxury—and let’s call it what it is, it’s a luxury—of these long summer days at the beach with my boys instead of being inside a hospital all of the time?”

Lu drew herself up to her full height, wishing it were fuller: she was a perfectly average-sized American woman, five feet five inches. “No,” she said. “I’m not sure you would.” Full-time family time was one of those things that sound lovely in the abstract, but wait until Chase cut his foot on a clamshell and then got sand in the cut and had to be carried back to the house. Wait until Sebastian came home from a birthday party high on cupcakes and Capri Sun and turned into a wet puddle of emotions.

Jeremy tented his fingers together. “I do the work I do so I can provide for this family. I thought we were working for something together. Your part, my part.” He made motions with his hands while he was saying this, as though he were marking out different sections to be constructed later with plywood and nails. “I thought we were going to have another baby, Lu.”

She had the sensation of standing on the high dive at the community pool she used to go to as a child. (She only went there when a friend’s mother could drive, because her mother had to work.) She closed her eyes, and she jumped. “My part isn’t enough for me, Jeremy. It’s just not. I wish it were, I really, really wish it were. But it’s not.” She inhaled, then let the breath out slowly. “You wouldn’t be you without your work to make you complete, and nobody expects that you would be. You told me once that being at the hospital is like a drug for you—that you actually feel like you get high on it sometimes! I can’t . . .” She paused, trying to make sure she was saying the right thing. “It’s not enough for me, being with the boys all the time. The blog is really important to me.”