Well, that was a question. The right question, he realized. It hadn't occurred to him to ask it himself, or at least not to put it this way. He'd spent hours thinking about what she wanted and how he couldn't manage it; what she would demand of him and how it would destroy him to capitulate. He had not thought about what he wanted, and certainly not deeply enough to have separated out need from want. Actually, the last time he'd given serious thought to what he wanted might have been before they married, when he was choosing a bride and explaining to Angelica why it couldn't be her. That was what came to mind first and easiest, anyway: I wanted a wife who would take my money and go on trips and not care what I was up to while she was away. But Angelica clearly could never be that, any more than he could offer her the full transparency she sought from him.
When he thought about their relationship now, the marriage he had rather than the one he'd imagined — what did he want? They had never had stability or ease; they had been broken from day one. Broken from before the start of the engagement. And she was always trying to fix it, always pushing. Things would be different once they settled in; once the baby came; if he took her with him on a tour of the shipping company; if she let him flirt with people at parties. And since the break in their relationship had coincided with his confession to her, he had always suspected that when she set about trying to fix their relationship, somewhere beneath it she was also hoping to fix him. She told him she accepted him and wanted him to be happy, but he'd never believed her. She wanted to martyr herself for his sake, or she wanted to wait him out until he finally collapsed into the husband she wanted — she could not really desire his happiness, when so many pieces of it ran contrary to her own.
"I think," he began slowly, feeling his way as he went. "I need to know if she really thought there was a baby." He let out a long breath and considered how entirely unhinged this statement would seem to Arthur, then added, "I told her we shouldn't marry. She told me she was pregnant." The rest of the story told itself, he thought. Three years later, and no child had arrived.
He'd never been able to ask her. Her grief that summer filled every room; he couldn't breathe around her, much less start difficult conversations. He'd never wanted a child, so he wasn't angry or disappointed that she hadn't been pregnant. But if she'd lied to him at a critical juncture, then lied to him for months — if that was the foundation of their marriage — it seemed important to know.
What he really needed was to trust her again — but without knowing this, he didn't know if he could.
Lou made this! <3
![[Image: AAgFt3c.png]](https://i.imgur.com/AAgFt3c.png)
