"We have a daughter. We have a daughter in the next room." His voice was rising now, not in volume but in pitch, the way it did when he was trying not to cry. "When Emma was born. In the hospital. The nurse asked. I was standing right there. She asked if it was your first pregnancy and you said yes. I remember it. I remember you saying it."
Natalie closed her eyes.
She remembered it too. She had remembered it every day for twelve years. A small nurse with a clipboard and purple scrubs, cheerful, tired, at three in the morning at Swedish Medical Center. First pregnancy, hon? And Adam beside the bed, holding a paper cup of ice chips, his face shining with fear and joy, and Natalie had looked at him and said yes, and the nurse had written it down, and the lie had gone into a chart somewhere and become a fact.
"I remember," she said.
"Why?" He said it quietly. "Why would you— I wouldn't have cared. Do you understand that? If you had told me when we met. If you'd told me on our third date, or the night I proposed, or any night. I wouldn't have cared. I would have—" He made a helpless gesture. "I would have held you."
"I know," she said. "That was the problem."
He stared at her.