Hearing a word as clinical as “prenatal” from Zack is oddly endearing. He straightens in his chair and smiles. His face is confident, as though he’s sure he’s won his case.

Suhani admires her husband’s strong jaw and the prominent dimple in his chin. Maybe she should change the subject and order another round of cocktails. Or maybe they can talk about this, move on, and have sex at home. Have a night that wouldn’t be possible with a baby.

But the words she hasn’t said build pressure on her tongue. She’s not sure if it’s her buzz or exhaustion. All she knows is that she can’t keep this from Zack anymore, not for another second. The syllables spill out of her before she has a chance to filter them.

“I’ve been pregnant before.”

Zack frowns. At first she thinks he didn’t hear her properly, but then she sees the jerky movements of his hands, the line emerging between his eyebrows. Someone else, someone who doesn’t know him, wouldn’t even notice that he’s different. But Suhani’s stomach twists into a knot. She almost wants to say Just kidding! to break the moment.

“You have been pregnant before?” Zack asks. “What do you . . . What are you talking about?”

There’s no going back now. Some fights in a marriage come out of nowhere, but others you can see coming. But she never worried, really worried, during any of theirs because, even when things were bad, they were still overall good. It was a concept she didn’t know existed before meeting Zack, the idea that a relationship could have an impermeable layer of security that no disagreement could ever penetrate.

“I was pregnant in med school. And then I made sure I wasn’t.” There. She said it. And just in case it wasn’t clear: “I had an abortion.”

“So . . . Roshan, then?” Zack stares at her, his expression a mixture of confusion and shock. “But we’ve talked about this so many times and you never said anything.”

He says this as though that line of reasoning can make her words untrue, as though she just got some facts wrong.

“It hasn’t come up because I made sure it didn’t.”

“But I remember”—Zack’s face shifts as he scans his mind—“us even discussing the idea of you being pregnant and you said you couldn’t imagine what that would be like.”

“I know.” Suhani gulps. “I lied.”

She says the words again in her mind. I lied. I lied. I lied.

“Wow . . .” Zack shifts in his chair. The defeated look on his face makes Suhani hate herself.

“Please tell me what you’re thinking,” Suhani says.