"It could have been you. The dates, they were so close. Days apart. I didn't know. I swear I didn't know."
"But you thought about it."
"Every day," she said. "When I found out I was pregnant, in October, the first thing I felt was joy, and the second thing I felt was terror, and the terror never went away. Not for sixteen years. I would just learn to carry it in a different place."
"Why didn't you tell me then?" He heard his own voice rising and did not stop it. "In October. When it was still just a question. Why didn't you just tell me there was a question?"
She looked at him for a long time.
"Because you were three months sober," she said, "and when I showed you that test, you sat down on the bathroom floor and cried and said, This is it, Mel, this is the reason. You said it over and over. This is the reason I'm going to make it. You told Ray. You told your mom. You told everyone at your meetings. You stopped going to the bars on Mill Avenue on the way home from work because you said you had a kid to think about now. You started fixing the car. You started running in the mornings. You painted the nursery that yellow color, remember, because we didn't know if it was a boy or a girl. Ray told me once, privately, at a picnic, that the first year was the most dangerous, that most people relapse in the first year. And I looked at you painting that room, and I thought, if I tell him, I will kill him. I really thought that. I thought I'd be handing you the bottle myself."
Eric sat very still.