I chewed at my thumbnail and closed my eyes. For the first time in four months, I felt glad that we hadn’t gotten pregnant. Days ago, our marriage had begun to crumble under the crushing weight of what I’d discovered: our relationship no longer consisted of just two people. Another woman had intruded on us. What baby deserved such a predicament? No baby deserved it—not mine, not anyone’s.

There was one problem: my period was due yesterday, and it had not yet shown. I hoped with all my might that jet lag and stress were to blame.

I took a final look at my best friend’s new child, feeling not envy but unease about the future. I would have loved for my child to be Ainsley’s lifelong best friend, to have a connection just like the one I had with Rose. Yet after learning James’s secret, I wasn’t sure marriage remained in the cards for me, let alone motherhood.

For the first time in ten years, I considered that maybe I’d made a mistake at the edge of that pier, when I told James yes. What if I’d said no, or not yet? I highly doubted I’d still be in Ohio, spending my days at a job I didn’t love and my marriage teetering precariously over the edge of a cliff. Would I have lived somewhere in London instead, teaching or researching? Maybe I would have my head stuck in fairy tales, as James liked to joke, but wouldn’t that still be better than the nightmare in which I now found myself?

I’d always valued my husband’s pragmatism and calculated nature. For much of our marriage, I viewed this as James’s way of keeping me grounded, safe. When I ventured a spontaneous idea—anything falling outside of his predetermined goals and desires—he’d quickly bring me back to earth with his outline of the risks, the downside. This rationality was, after all, what had propelled him forward at his firm. But now, a world away from James, I wondered for the first time if the dreams I once chased had been little more than an accounting problem to him. He’d been more concerned with return on investment and risk management than he’d been with my own happiness. And what I’d always considered sensible in James seemed, for the first time, something else: stifling and subtly manipulative.

I shifted in my seat, pulled my sticky thighs from the leather and flicked off my phone. Dwelling on home and the what-could-have-been would do me no good in London.