He didn’t move. I think he was afraid to breathe.
“Ben.”
“Yeah?”
“Next year, for her birthday, we’re doing the cake inside. I’m not scrubbing frosting out of that hair in the backyard hose again.”
He laughed. A real laugh. The first real laugh I’d heard from him in a year.
“Deal,” he said.
People ask me sometimes how I could go back to him.
My friend Rachel asked it straight out once, over lunch. “Claire, he threw you out. With a newborn. How do you even look at him?”I thought about it for a long time before I answered.
“Because the thing that nearly destroyed us wasn’t his infertility,” I said finally. “It wasn’t even the red hair. It was the secret. It was eleven years of shame that he was taught to hide, by a mother who was taught to hide hers, by a man who ran away from a sick kid in a hospital bed. That shame got passed down like an old coat. Nobody ever took it off. They just kept handing it to the next person.”
