“I know. I know. Claire, I know—”
“No. You don’t know. You don’t know anything about what the last three days have been like.”
My dad appeared behind me in the hallway. I felt him more than saw him, a solid wall of anger at my back.
“You’ve got some nerve,” my dad said, low and dangerous.
Ben didn’t even look at him. He was looking only at me. And then his legs just folded. He dropped to his knees on my parents’ welcome mat, right there in front of the whole street, and grabbed the hem of my mother’s pink robe with both hands like a drowning man grabbing a rope.
“You don’t understand,” he sobbed. “You don’t understand. I should have told you. I should have told you long before you got pregnant. Before we got married. I should have told you the day I met you.”
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat.
“Then tell me now,” I said.
Diane stepped forward fast. She grabbed Ben’s shoulder.
“Ben,” she said. “Ben, she won’t understand—”
“No, Mom.” He shook her hand off. He didn’t look away from me. “She has to know. She should have known six years ago. She has to know.”
He took a breath. A long, shaking breath.
“Claire,” he said. “I can’t have children.”
The words didn’t make sense. They just hung in the air.
“What?”
“I’ve known since I was nineteen. I had cancer. Testicular cancer, my sophomore year of college. They caught it early, and I did the chemo, and I beat it. But afterward, the doctor ran tests. And he said…” His voice broke. “He said the chemo had wiped everything out. He said I would never be able to father a child. Not naturally. Not ever.”
