Which brought her to misfortune number five: number five was a doozy. It was funny, nearly, until you realized it was tragic. At first Suzanne thought they had somehow brought the mold with them from their house, but—get this!—she now understood that the fuggy, weedy odor she’d so often smelled these past few months, the smell that she attributed to mold, the smell that had been a pivotal reason for bringing Nick Cox in to demolish their house, rendering her and her son homeless, well, that fuggy weedy smell was . . . weed. Grant reeked of it when he came to bed at night. She couldn’t deny it anymore. His attempts to wash off his sins were a joke: he was permeated through and through.

And, well, weed was one thing, wasn’t it? Even she had to admit smoking wasn’t such a big deal anymore. If he could smoke socially, the way people drank socially, be successful at work, and be a good husband and father, she could, perhaps, learn to live with his occasionally getting high, but he was acting like the druggies she’d known in high school, off in a land where a sleepy “Peace, dude” sufficed as conversation. She and Grant had had a weird exchange the other night, when she told him about the cerclage. She caught him in a lie, but she suspected there was a deeper lie beneath that lie. She wondered if he’d been fired. Would he tell her if he had? That was the tragic aspect. He couldn’t seem to learn from his mistakes.

She didn’t trust him anymore, she thought with a shiver. Had she ever? He’d always been a chameleon, transforming himself from lawyer, to lover, to husband and father. He was an actor, much of his act designed to “get the girl.” Well, he’d gotten her all right. He’d gotten her good.

She hadn’t meant to complicate her life this way: the Life Plan was designed to prevent this sort of collapse! She was going to spend her life in high-rises, in pencil skirts and high heels, buying and selling businesses until she dropped. Instead she was trapped. As trapped as Cinderella, as Rapunzel in her tower, as Snow White in the dwarves’ cottage—an analogy that continued to serve. Her uterus squeezed tight, painfully this time. Suzanne took a deep breath against the pressure.

Ted appeared at the kitchen door, his expression shifting from pleased to concerned. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, forcing a smile.

He tossed a bag of Oreos on the table. “Contraband.”

She nodded, trying to look appreciative, but afraid the pain made her look ghoulish.

“Can I be honest with you?” he said.

She nodded.

“You don’t look so good.”

“They’re only Braxton-Hicks contractions. False alarms.”

He poured two glasses of milk, toasting the baby’s and her health, and sat across from her.