“It wasn’t the cat, Beth. It was us.” She hesitated, almost loath to admit the rest. “One night last week Marcus and I spent half an hour talking baby talk to the thing, trying to coax it out from under the bed to play with this new squeak toy Marcus bought. Suddenly we looked at each other, sitting on the floor in our work clothes acting like a couple of idiots, and it hit us what we were doing. And the worst part was, we couldn’t even smile about it. It was just too…pathetic. So Marcus found another home for the cat the next day. A home where it’s allowed to just be a cat.”
Beth’s cheerful blue eyes filled with sympathy. “Okay, so you haven’t found what works yet, but you will.”
“I wish I could be so sure.” Marcus hadn’t called after his meetings in New Jersey the day before as he’d promised. He’d phoned, instead just as Lisa was climbing into their big empty bed that night, and he’d been different somehow. Nothing she could name exactly, just a little distant, evasive, as he’d answered her questions about the day. She’d hung up with the unsettling knowledge that no matter how much she loved her husband, no matter how solid their friendship was or how completely she believed in them as a couple, their marriage was in serious trouble.
“Have you tried to talk to him again about the possibility of artificial insemination? It’s the perfect answer, you know.” Beth was a doctor, too, though not a pediatrician like Lisa, and she ran a fertility clinic at Thornton. Not only was she Lisa’s friend, she was also the doctor who’d overseen the months of testing she and Marcus had been through in their attempts to have a child.
“I’m not going to mention it to him again,” Lisa said. Her stomach became tied in knots just remembering what had happened the first time she’d broached the subject with Marcus. She’d already tried talking to him about adoption, she’d brought home pamphlets on fostering a child, and both times Marcus had refused even to discuss the issues with her. But he’d discussed artificial insemination, all right. She still remembered the stricken look on his face.
Beth’s brow furrowed. “It sounds as if nothing else is working, hon. What could it hurt to talk about it to him again? The clinic’s designed for couples in your position.” Tragically widowed while still in her early thirties, Beth had never had children of her own. Now she spent her life helping others to do so.
“I can’t, Beth. He’ll just tell me that if I’m dissatisfied with what he can and cannot provide, then I’m free to leave him for someone who can satisfy me. The worst part is, I think he really means it. As much as he loves me, he would just let me go. He’s so eaten up with self-hatred he can’t even look at things with an open mind. And I can’t hurt him anymore. He sees his sterility as his ultimate failure, and I can’t continue to rub it in his face.”
“Do you think he’s failed you?” Beth asked.
“No!” Lisa had no doubts about that. “I’m a doctor. I know he had nothing to do with the fever that rendered him sterile. I love him, Beth, flaws and all. But…”
“But?”
“But I just can’t see either one of us being happy without a child. It’s what we both want more than anything on earth, what we’ve always wanted. Hell, Marcus and I were planning a nursery before we even planned our wedding. Every big decision we’ve ever made, every goal we’ve set, has been influenced by the family we’d planned to raise. I just don’t see how we can keep a union that’s been built on such a foundation from toppling over.”
“Answer one question for me.” Beth’s eyes were piercing.
“Sure. If I can.”
“Who do you love more, need more—your husband, or the baby he was supposed to give you?”
“That one’s easy. My husband. He’s my best friend. I can’t imagine a life without Marcus.”
Beth stood up, nodding. “Then you’ll find your answer, Lis.”
“Even though there’s a part of me, a part that’s been there as long as I can remember, who needs to be a mother, too?” Lisa asked the question softly, almost afraid even to say the words out loud.
Beth’s eyes warmed with concern. Lisa knew how much her friend was pulling for her and Marcus. The three of them had formed an unshakable bond that first year after Beth’s husband had been shot waiting in line at a fast-food restaurant. She and Marcus had insisted that Beth move in with them, and for six months they’d both taken turns sitting up with their friend on those nights when the demons had become too fierce for her to face alone. That had been more than five years ago.
“I understand your reluctance, Lis,” Beth said now, “but you need to talk to him again. Have him come visit me. Maybe if he sees how much he’ll be involved in the process, if he understands how scientific everything is, he’ll come around.”
Lisa smiled and nodded as her friend left, but she knew she wouldn’t do as Beth suggested. She’d never known Marcus to look so beaten as he had the night she’d tried to talk to him about giving him a child through artificial insemination. She’d never seen him so angry. Or so hurt. No, she couldn’t do that to him again.
TWO DAYS LATER when she unpacked Marcus’s suitcase and found the shirt rolled in with his other dirty clothes, she was tempted to change her mind. She picked up the shirt slowly, staring blankly at the lipstick-stained collar for a moment, her mind masked with disbelief. It couldn’t be.
Standing there, unable to move, to look away, she felt frightened—and stupid. Had Marcus…? Surely he hadn’t…No. Of course not. He wouldn’t. Not ever.
And then she remembered his phone call from New Jersey. Not only had he not called when he’d promised, he’d been strangely evasive.
She blinked, surprised when a tear splashed onto the incriminating collar. Had they come to this, then? Had they really come to this? Were their ties of friendship, their loyalties to each other, in jeopardy? Was the love she’d cherished for more than a decade going to slip through her fingers right along with her dream of having a child? She dropped the shirt as if she’d been burned.
And then just as suddenly picked it up again. The lipstick was still there. She could see it through the blur of her tears. She just couldn’t believe it. And didn’t know what to do about it. This happened to other women, other couples. Not to her and Marcus.
“Nothing happened.”
Lisa jumped. She hadn’t heard Marcus come upstairs.
“Something apparently did,” she said, throwing his shirt in his face. It was too much. To lose Marcus on top of everything else was just too much.
He grabbed her arm as she pushed by him. “Nothing happened, Lisa.”
She looked up at him, this man of her dreams, and even blinded by tears of anger and disappointment, she knew she still loved him. After ten years of marriage, after eighteen months of anguish, even after finding another woman’s makeup on his clothes, she felt the impact of him clear to her soul. “Her lipstick’s on your collar.”
Marcus dropped her arm and bowed his head. “We had dinner—and one dance. That’s all.”
It was enough. She knew him that well. Wrapping her arms around her middle, she warded off the darkness that threatened to consume her. “You wanted her.”
“She wanted me. And yes, I guess part of me wanted her, too, wanted to be with a woman who didn’t know I could only do half the job.”
A sob broke through the constriction in Lisa’s throat, and she backed away from him.
“Who was she?” She willed herself to speak calmly.
Marcus swore and strode over to her, grabbing her arms, forcing her to look at him. “Nobody. She was nobody, Lis. Just a woman. Any woman who’d looked at me the way she did