The night John got drunk at Mero Mayor’s, he’d fallen asleep on the fold-out love seat in his office and woken at three, confused at first as to where he was but quickly oriented by the sick feeling in his gut, a feeling that had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with fear. He realized, then, with a clarity bred of waking at a strange hour in a strange setting, waking dead sober out of his drunkenness, that fear is what it was, what he’d felt, what had been eating at him these weeks since the baby’s birth and death. Fear and not grief, and why was that?

Because Ricky was not Ricky; Ricky was different, changed, not changed, he believed, as grief might legitimately alter someone, but changed in a way that was causing him dread. He might have been babbling incoherently when he’d raised the idea of her having an affair, and maybe Lance was right to have shushed him, but he hadn’t been entirely out of bounds. This he knew from the cold quiver in his gut. He knew it rising from the cheap love seat and stumbling out of his office down the hall to the men’s room to pee. He knew it putting on his shoes, lacing his goddamn shoes at three in the morning in the empty theater building and then exiting into the parking lot, fumbling with his key in the cold on the barren campus with the stars out, and the moon: he knew the danger of losing everything was real.

It took him fifteen minutes to get home, which, if he’d been in a frame of mind to think about it, was scary: he was lucky he hadn’t been pulled over, or worse. He came into their bedroom and switched on the overhead light and Ricky sat up immediately: blinking, blinking, a sweet little cat, confused, her hair all pushed about with sleep. Except it turned out she hadn’t really been asleep, or not very. She’d been waiting for him to come home, she said. She’d been worried, she said, had kept waking, checking the clock, listening for his truck in the driveway.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“What?”

“If you were worried, why didn’t you try calling?” Tired as he was, exhausted, wanting badly to remove his shoes, his socks, his belt, his jeans, to lie on the cool white sheets, still he stood by the door, yards from her. She was sitting up in bed, cross-legged in a sleeveless nightgown, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes getting used to the light, her cheeks flushed, pink and pretty, like a cheap figurine of a schoolgirl.

“I didn’t know if you’d want me to.You were the one who—Why didn’t you call?”

So that much was out on the table: she thought he might not want her call. “You thought”—he wanted to get this right—“I was angry at you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, John. Why are you standing over there? Why don’t—Why aren’t you coming to bed?”

He shook his head.

“What does that mean?”

“You tell me.” He could see she was afraid now.

“Why don’t you tell me? What’s wrong?”

He shook his head again.

“I don’t understand.” Her voice quavered.

“You tell me,” he repeated, and waited, and she began to cry. He crossed the room eventually, and sat on the bed and touched her foot through the blanket. But when she reached for him, went to lean her head on his shoulder, he pulled back.

She sat up straight. “Tell you what?”

But he waited.

Something changed; something shifted in her eyes. Only then did he know he’d been right.

“You mean,” she said, twisting the top sheet, “you mean about the baby. I knew. Before I told you. I didn’t tell you right away. Is that it?”

He rose from the bed, hardly aware he was doing so, and backed away a few steps. “What do you mean you didn’t tell me ‘right away’? When did you know?”

Just audibly: “In December.”

It was so far from anything he’d guessed. It was as if he’d braced himself for a burn and been knocked down by a wave.

She’d received the diagnosis of anencephaly at the five-month ultrasound, along with the statistics, the odds, and their options, and she’d kept it to herself—lied to him—not only throughout the rest of the pregnancy, which maybe, maybe he could have forgiven, could have tried very hard to understand, to chalk up to estrogen, the sanctity of a woman with child, all those things you were supposed to revere even though—or because—you could never understand them—but even after the baby’s birth, even as she held the baby in her selfish, unyielding arms, even after he died in those arms and was taken from them, she had preserved the lie, this lie she’d jammed between them.

“Why?” John asked, holding himself very still, a necessary counterpoint to the maelstrom crashing within. The weathermap photo of the baby she’d brought home with her from that ultrasound and put on the fridge for the rest of the family to mull and coo over; this, too, he was realizing, had been part of the deception. It occurred to him there had been countless concrete instances between December and April when he’d made some comment about the baby, about the future, and she had let him, had actively allowed the untruth to flourish. The crib he’d bought and assembled. The newborn diapers. The mobile with the cloth moons and stars.

“I didn’t . . .” Ricky looked at her hands, a piece of the sheet gathered in them in a small white knot. She released it, opened her palms to the ceiling. “I didn’t want anyone to tell me to end the pregnancy.”

“You think that’s what I would’ve done.”

“The woman, the technician, said it’s what most people do.”

“I’m not talking about the technician.You think that’s what I would have done.”

“I don’t know.” She’d shrugged her slim shoulders.They went up and down. She was a poppet, a little doll with alabaster arms and moving parts. “I didn’t want any counseling.” He watched her carefully, coldly. He had the feeling she was trying out explanations as they came to her. “Or consoling. I didn’t want sympathy.”

“Or interference.”

“No.” It was a statement of agreement.

“You didn’t want my interference.” The word coating his mouth like ground aspirin.

She shrugged again: the pale oblongs went up and down. He wanted to hit her then.

“You wouldn’t let me hold him.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“No.” He cut her off. “I don’t want to hear you’re sorry. I thought you were in shock, totally undone. I asked if I could hold him. You remember? You remember what you did? You didn’t say no. You didn’t shake your head. You did nothing. Nothing. You didn’t respond. And I didn’t press. I didn’t ask again.” He stood and ran a hand through his hair. “You weren’t in shock.You’d known for months.”

Ricky wrapped her arms around her knees, hugged them to her chest. “You can’t sit on the same bed with me?” He didn’t answer, and she answered herself: “You can’t bear to sit on the same bed with me.”

“And then after,” John went on, as if she hadn’t spoken, “when you still didn’t tell me.When you kept up the act.”

She looked up at him swiftly. Her pretty chin, her eyes even now spilling over. A trace of wiles? How could he ever know, now, how could he ever now judge what was real and what playacting?

“What good,” she begged, “would it have done us?”

“If you have to—” He reached out a hand and it met the wall. He steadied himself.“If you have to ask,” he’d said,“I don’t know how we can be together.”

“John.” She rose from the bed so that she was standing, too, and he took a step back in case she thought she could touch him. “This is me. Please. I kept a secret. I thought it was the right thing. It wasn’t right, but I thought it was. It was hard on me. I didn’t cheat on you. It’s not like an affair.”

“It’s exactly like an affair.” He thought—they both must be thinking, of course, and it was strange to consider, even in that moment, all the intimacies and history they shared—of the affair she’d had before their wedding. “It’s worse than when you had the affair.” He struggled to say why, to think why. He looked out the window at the lights of the bridge. “That was bad. It was a secret and a lie, but you could say, in a way—a stupid way, but still, you could argue it didn’t involve me. Directly.”

He gathered up, almost absentmindedly, the extra blanket they kept folded on the window seat. He took a pillow from the bed.

“John? John.” She followed him to the door. She was crying again. “You can’t look at me?”

He looked at her. He looked at her. “This was my child.Too.”