"Trying isn't enough," he retorted, shaking his head. "Not if everything's still shit when you're through."

You're still trying, that means you're not a bad husband was the sort of thing that might have seemed encouraging to Ben in February, when he'd thought that trying would be enough. It was the difference between the first year of his marriage, from the elopement up through January, and the resolution he'd made when he found out about the baby. Before he'd been pretending, and he'd been doing a good job of faking it, but when things got difficult he hadn't been trying. He was there for the easy bits and when they fought, he had that trump card he could pull out and hide behind: I never wanted this. Even if he didn't say it, they both knew. He'd decided in January that he was going to start trying, and at the time he'd thought that would be enough. If that was enough, though, things would have been better by now. Maybe not fixed, but at least improving. He'd been trying, though, and he still hadn't managed to get through a conversation of any significant degree with Melody. She still wasn't leaving her room. Witch Weekly had started theorizing that he was just waiting around for her to die. He'd tried to be helpful during the course of her illness in the only way he knew how, and he'd sent her into a fucking coma that the healers at the hospital had needed to work to get her out of. He still didn't know if it had affected the baby, either her being so sick for so long or being unconscious for days.

"I just — need to get through tomorrow," he said, running a hand through his hair. He didn't know how he was going to get through anything else, but tomorrow was more pressing — and everything else wasn't Art's problem, besides. He was here as Ben's second for the duel, not as his second for the whole shit storm that his life had become. "I'll — I'll figure out how to tell her afterwards," he said, though with absolutely no confidence that he ever would.