She was pleased with herself for thinking of it. “What a clever idea!” everyone would say on Christmas Day. Lyn definitely needed the stress relief. Gemma didn’t need it but she’d be right into pretending that she did. Cat herself wasn’t especially stressed either, but perhaps she was, because she wasn’t pregnant and she’d been off the Pill now for nearly a year. “Don’t get stressed about it,” everybody said wisely, as if they were the first to pass on that hot little tip. Apparently, the moment your ovaries noticed you were worried about becoming pregnant, they refused to cooperate. Oh well, if you’re going to get all huffy about it, we’ll just close down.

A health insurance ad came on. Dan winced. “I hate this ad.”

“It’s effective. You watch it more closely than any other ad on television.”

He closed his eyes and averted his head. “O.K. I’m not looking, I’m not looking. Oh God. I can still hear that woman’s grating voice.”

Cat picked up the remote and turned up the volume.

“Aaaagh!” He opened his eyes and grabbed the remote from her.

He was behaving perfectly normally. She remembered that afterward and it made it worse, somehow. Every moment he behaved normally was part of the betrayal.

“Shh. It’s back on.”

Ellie’s betrayed boyfriend, Pete, appeared on the screen, flexing his freakish abs. Ellie gave the TV audience guilty looks.

“Tell him,” Cat told her. “I’d want to know. I couldn’t stand not to know the truth. Better to tell him, Ellie.”

“You think so?” said Dan.

“Yeah. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

There were no bells jangling a warning in Cat’s head. Not a single chime.

She had put down her wineglass on the coffee table and was feeling a pimple that had just that very moment appeared on her chin, undoubtedly a malevolent herald of her forthcoming period. Each month it appeared like an official stamp on her chin. There will be no baby for this woman this month. Nope. Sorry, try again! Cat had begun to cackle bitterly, throwing back her head witchlike, as soon as the first treacherous spots of blood appeared. It was such a joke, such a crushing anticlimax, after all those years of anxiously ensuring she didn’t have a baby, after all those months of “Are we ready to make this momentous change in our lives? I think we are, don’t you? Ooh, maybe we should have one more month of freedom!”

Don’t think about it, she told herself. Don’t think about it.

“Cat,” said Dan.

“What?”

“I have to tell you something.”

She snorted at his ponderous tone, pleased to be distracted from her pimple. She thought he was sending up the show. “Oh my God!” she said and hummed the Med School sound track that helpfully warned viewers when something dramatic and awful was about to happen. “What? Have you done an Ellie? Have you been unfaithful to me?”

“Well. Yes.”

He looked like he was going to be sick and he wasn’t that great an actor.

Cat put down her fork. “This is a joke, right? You’re saying you’ve slept with someone else?”

“Yes.” Now his mouth was doing something strange. He looked like a guilty little boy caught doing something disgusting.

She picked up the remote and turned off the television. Her heart was thumping with fear but also a strangely urgent desire, a desire to know. It was the sick feeling of excited resistance at the very top of the roller coaster—I don’t want to go hurtling over that precipice but I do, I do!

“When?” She still didn’t really believe it. She was half laughing. “Years ago, do you mean? When we first started going out? You don’t mean recently?”

“About a month ago.”

“What?”

“It didn’t mean anything.” He looked down at his plate and picked up a mushroom with his fingers. Halfway to his mouth, he dropped it and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Would you just start from the beginning, please? When?”

“One night.”

“What night? Where was I?” She fumbled through her mind for events over the last few weeks. “What night?”

It seemed that on a Tuesday night, three weeks before, at drinks after squash he met a girl. She came on to him, and he was flattered because she was, well, quite good-looking. He was a bit drunk, and so he went back to her place and one thing led to another. It didn’t mean anything, obviously. He didn’t know why he had made such a stupid, stupid mistake. Maybe all the stress lately with work, and, you know, the baby thing. Obviously it would never happen again and he was very, very, very sorry and he loved her so much and God, it was such a relief to have this out in the open!

It was almost like something interesting and unusual had happened to him and he’d forgotten to tell Cat about it until now. She asked him questions and he answered them. “Where did she live? How did you get home?”

He finished his story and Cat stared stupidly at him, waiting for it to hurt. All her muscles were tensed tight in anticipation of pain. It was like giving blood and waiting for the smiling doctor to find her vein.

“What was her name?” she said.

His eyes slid away. “Angela.”

Finally. An exquisite twist of her heart because this girl actually had a name and Dan knew her name.

She gazed at her dinner congealing on her plate, and she could see every snakelike strand of spaghetti in nauseating definition. The lens of a telescope had been clicked, and her previously blurry world was now in sharp-edged focus.