“Sorry.” He laughed. “I’ll see you tonight. I’m bringing a chicken, right?”

“Yes, yes! Go away!”

He liked to check things. And double-check. And triple-check. Just to be sure. It could potentially become an annoying habit, but then, everyone had annoying habits. And she wouldn’t have even considered asking Nick to do something so menial as buy a barbecue chicken on a weeknight! Nick was too busy and important. When Dominick came over after a day’s work, he was totally present. Not like Nick, who would sometimes act as if Alice and the children weren’t quite real, as if his real life was at the office. It wasn’t as if Dominick didn’t have a stressful job, too. Nick might run a company but Dominick ran a school. And which one was contributing more to the community?

She just wished she would stop comparing Dominick to Nick, as if all the reasons she loved Dominick were simply because he was so different from Nick. It sometimes seemed as if the whole point of her relationship with Dominick was how it compared to her relationship with Nick.

The other day she and Dominick had been at Tom’s soccer game and Nick was there, too. She’d been so aware of his eyes on them from the other side of the field as she laughed extra hard at Dominick’s jokes. She’d made herself a bit sick, to be honest.

The awful thing was that even when Nick wasn’t there, she was always imagining him watching. Look at us snuggled up on the couch together watching TV, Nick. He’s rubbing my feet. You never did that. Look at us walking hand in hand into this café. No fuss about finding the “perfect” table—we just sit down! Look, Nick, look!

So did that make her relationship with Dominick nothing more than a performance?

She slowed down to a brisk walk, panting hard, and remembered how she’d sat in the kitchen drinking wine with Nick and the blissful relief she’d felt kissing him.

Stupid. So mortifying. He’d kissed her back, though. He’d been willing to “try again.”

She had absolutely no desire to try again. None whatsoever. Been there, done that. Time to move on with her life. She had made the right decision. The children loved Dominick. He’d probably spent more time with them than they’d ever spent with their father.

And she and Nick were so civil and grown-up nowadays! They had finally worked out a “shared parenting arrangement” that suited them both. Nick wasn’t having them fifty percent of the time, but he was seeing them a lot more than just on weekends. He was actually taking Friday afternoons off from work so he could pick them up from school.

Recently, she had found she was actually looking forward to seeing him when he dropped off the children. It was going to be one of those “amicable” divorces.

Yes, a good marriage (if you averaged it all out) followed by a good divorce. According to the children, Nick had a girlfriend. Megan.

Alice wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about Megan.

The phone rang again.

At last. It was him. She sat down on somebody’s red-brick garden wall.

“Tell me,” she said. “Hurry up and tell me!”

At first she couldn’t understand him. He seemed to be in the middle of blowing his nose.

“What? What did you say?”

“A little girl,” said Ben, loud and clear. “A beautiful little baby girl.”

Chapter 34

Elisabeth’s Homework for Jeremy I never believed I was going to have a baby until I heard her cry. Sorry to admit that, Jeremy, because I know you worked your heart out trying to stop me from being a basket case.

But I never believed it. That day in the Port-a-loo, while the world’s largest lemon meringue pie baked, I was convinced I was having my last miscarriage.

But then the bleeding stopped. It was just “spotting,” as the medical world cheerily calls it. A spot of rain. A spot of bother.

But even when the spotting finally stopped, I didn’t believe I was having a baby. Even when every ultrasound was normal. Even when I could feel the baby kicking and rolling, even when I was going to prenatal classes, choosing a crib, washing the baby clothes, and even when they were telling me, Okay, you can push now, I still didn’t believe I was having a baby. Not an actual baby.

Until she cried. And I thought, That sounds like a real newborn baby.

And now she’s here. Little Francesca Rose.

Through all those horrible years I hardly ever saw Ben cry. Now he can’t stop crying. It seems like he had gigantic drums of tears stockpiled that he can finally release. I look over at him holding her asleep in his arms, and he has tears running silently down his face. We’ll be bathing her together and I’ll ask him to pass me a towel, and I’ll discover he’s crying again. I say, Ben, please. Darling.

I don’t cry as much. I’m concentrating too hard on doing it all right. Ringing Alice up to ask questions about breast-feeding. How do you know if she’s getting enough? Worrying about her crying. What is it this time? Wind? Worrying about her weight. Her skin. (It seems a bit dry.)

But sometimes, in the middle of the night, when it’s a good breast-feed and she’s attached properly and sucking well, suddenly the reality of her, the actuality of her, the aliveness of her, the exquisiteness of her, hits me so hard, wham, and the happiness is so huge, so amazing, it explodes like fireworks through my brain. I don’t know how to describe it. Maybe it’s like your first hit of heroin.

(How will I get her to just say no to drugs? Could I put her in some sort of early preventative therapy? What do you think, J? So much to worry about.)