“How am I supposed to have a marriage if I’m gone all the time?”

Caroline poured two more shots. “Can’t help you there.”

“I’m so screwed. When we were young, I was the one who wanted the relationship, the husband, the marriage. But then . . . my priorities changed. He went away on deployment, and I discovered my own life. It’s not fair to either of us. I changed into a different person. I’m not the girl he married. And I feel so guilty about that.”

“Listen, everybody changes.”

“God. You’re as bad as Will.”

“What does he think of your plan?”

“He keeps saying it’s up to me. That we’ll make it work. But he’s wrong. No matter what I decide, one of us gets shafted. If I take the job, he loses his wife. If I decline the opportunity, I lose out on the future I really want.”

“No room for compromise?”

Sierra was quiet for several moments. Then she downed her second shot. “Will would hate it if he knew I was drinking. We’re supposed to be trying for a baby. I’m horrible.”

“Stop it.”

“I can’t. I know I’m horrible. You know how the women at the Sewing Circle meetings talk about trying so desperately to escape their monster husbands? Well, here’s me, also desperate. I’m desperate to escape my perfect husband. So in this case, I’m the monster.”

Caroline grabbed her second shot and threw it back with a vengeance. “Christ, Sierra. Why are you telling me this stuff?”

“Because you’re my friend.”

“For something like this, you need more than a friend. You need a therapist. Or a marriage counselor. Some kind of professional. And I’m not one, not even close. And coming to me for relationship advice? Like asking the plumber to accessorize your outfit.”

Sierra helped herself to another drink. “For what it’s worth, I did see a counselor and laid it all out for her, the whole story. The only result was that I came away feeling even worse than I already do. Why would I put myself—and Will—through a painful session like that? No thank you.”

“I’m so sorry. Maybe it wasn’t the right counselor for you. I don’t know. I wish you had someone better than me to help you figure things out.”

Sierra sighed. “Everything seemed so easy when we were young.”

Speak for yourself, thought Caroline.

“It was all so crystal clear. Remember the summer you introduced me to Will for the very first time? I remember it like yesterday. I looked at him and just knew he would be my everything. God, I wish I could find that feeling again. It was so powerful. I thought it would last forever. And now here we are. I’m trapped by his perfection.”

“Not to be too obnoxious,” Caroline said, feeling the effects of the tequila, “but that’s not exactly the worst problem to have.”

“I had an abortion,” Sierra blurted out.

Every small hair on Caroline’s body prickled to attention. “What?” She gaped at her friend. “I mean, I heard what you said, but . . . Jesus. What happened? When? Are you all right?”

Sierra pressed her hands down on the countertop, the sleek new stone gleaming. “It was last year. I got pregnant. I thought I wanted . . . Will wants kids so badly. But I couldn’t do it. I tried so hard to want the same things he did. I knew he would be so happy. But I . . . I didn’t tell him, and I ended it in secret. I’m a terrible person.”

It was shocking, but Caroline refused to judge someone else’s private decision. “I hope he was understanding about it when you finally told him.”

“He still doesn’t know.”

Caroline nearly fell off her stool.

“He doesn’t know I was pregnant and he doesn’t know I terminated it. You’re the only one I’ve ever told.”

“Holy shit,” Caroline said. “Listen, this is really big, Sierra. Like I said, I’m no relationship expert, but I want . . .” What did she want? For the two of them to be happy, yes, yet she wasn’t sure what that meant. Sierra’s confession festered inside her, unspoken. The truth needed to come out, but it wasn’t hers to disclose—not to Will. Not to anyone. She couldn’t bear the thought of being around him, carrying this secret. “You should tell him. You need to tell him. He’s your husband, for chrissake.”

“It would break his heart. It would break our marriage.”

Caroline did not consider herself to be someone who knew how an intimate relationship worked. She’d never had much success in that department. But she was pretty sure a marriage plagued by a secret that big was already broken.

Part Seven

So often the end of a love affair is death by a thousand cuts, so often its survival is life by a thousand stitches.

—Robert Brault

Chapter 23

Standing at the kitchen counter, Will stared at the divorce decree, which had arrived in the day’s mail along with the Northern Tool + Equipment clearance catalog and the Peninsula Tattler.

The page was sectioned into vertical columns like a divided highway, like his life and Sierra’s had been split in two once the inevitable decision had steamrolled over them with breathtaking finality.

It had taken fifteen years to build a life together.

It had taken a mere three months to dismantle it. And after all was said and done, the settlement was just a formality. The life he’d dreamed of, planned for, built with his own hands and the sweat of his brow, was gone even more quickly. In an instant. In the time it took for a phone to ring, for a plus sign to appear on a home pregnancy stick, for a tear to fall down someone’s cheek.

The mediator—they had decided not to be contentious about it—told them they were lucky and smart to avoid a huge battle over their assets. There was no need for a battle. The fight had gone out of them both some time ago, slipping away unnoticed until it had irretrievably disappeared. In the end, being starkly honest, he and Sierra were forced to agree that they had the same goal—to end their marriage.

Will didn’t linger over the multipage document. He knew what was in it. The decree summed up their marriage in crisp, objective terms—how they would divvy up the cars, the Tiffany ring and other jewelry, the property, the pensions, the policies. A clean business transaction. It didn’t address the blurry details of all the ways he and Sierra had grown apart—his deployments, her loneliness, his accident, her ambivalence, his dream, her deception. Those things were all like a trickle of water through a crack in a rock, seemingly harmless. But when a deep freeze came along, the water cracked the rock into pieces.

That final deep freeze turned out to be the most frank and painful conversation they’d ever had. She told him she didn’t want kids.

Despite a churning disappointment, he had tried to be understanding. I’m married to you. I made a commitment, a vow. If you’ve changed your mind, I’ll make my peace with it.

That’s not what I want, she’d responded, her flood of tears seemingly endless. I tried so hard to want what you want. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t. Could. Not. She told him then that, last year, in the middle of a major catalog shoot, she’d terminated an early, unexpected pregnancy.