Chapter 2

She was still holding the second cup out when I reached her.

"They cancelled?"

"I did."

"Junie." She looked past me at the doors like somebody was going to come out and explain it. "Are you all right? Let me drive you. I'll leave my car and Colm can run me back for it tonight."

"I've got mine."

"Take this anyway. You didn't eat this morning. You never do before one of these."

I took it. I quit caffeine nine years ago because a nurse in Raleigh told me to, and in all that time Sabine has never once handed me a regular coffee by mistake.

"I'll call you tonight," she said.

"Okay."

I sat in my car with the cup in the holder until she went inside. Colm's jacket was still folded over her passenger seat, the canvas one with the company name on the back, and I looked at it for a while and then I backed out and drove home.

His truck wasn't in the driveway. The Sanford job was a full tear-off and he wouldn't be back before six.

I went into the second bedroom and got the desk chair and stood on it and pulled the file box down off the top shelf of the closet. It came down heavier than I expected. I set it on the floor and sat down next to it with my back against the bed frame.

Eleven years of paper. I file things. It's what I do all day and it's what I do at home, and I have never thrown out a statement in my life.

The first folder was the clinic in Raleigh. Six years ago Dr. Whitten sat across the desk from both of us and said the next step was a semen analysis, and Colm said absolutely, and wrote the number on the back of his hand with the pen off her desk. I watched him do it. He washed it off that night.

Four years ago the clinic called the house and asked him to come in and leave a sample. It's a twenty-minute appointment. He said he had a bid Thursday and he'd call them back, and then his father got sick, and then it was roofing season, and by the time anybody brought it up again the referral had expired and we had to start over.

Three years ago I printed out the IVF numbers and put them on the table after dinner. He read the whole first page, which I took as a good sign. Then he said he didn't love the idea of a lab making our kid, and he said it gently, and he reached across the table and held my hand while he said it.

Two years ago I brought it up one more time. He said we couldn't put that kind of money on a maybe.

I defended all four of those answers. To my mother. To Dot. To a woman at church who asked me why we didn't just adopt, like it was the same as picking up a different brand at the store. I sat at my own kitchen table and explained my husband to people who loved me, and I believed every word coming out of my mouth.

It was never about the money.

A lab would have known in a week.

The rest of the box was in order, because I put it in order. Pharmacy receipts. The bill from the second surgery. Nine years of statements from a plan I have coded claims against since I was twenty-three.

It was in the bottom third, in a folder I'd labeled MEDICAL — OLD in my own handwriting.

Insured: JUNIA RIDGEWAY. Patient: COLM RIDGEWAY. Date of service, October the fourteenth. Procedure code 55250. Patient responsibility, zero dollars.

I process that code maybe twice a month. It takes twenty minutes, it's outpatient, and I have explained it over the phone to more men than I can count. It's covered at a hundred percent under our plan. Under my plan.

That October the twins were six weeks old.

He was on the couch most of that week with a bag of frozen corn on his lap and the game on. He said he'd pulled something lifting a bundle of shingles and he'd be fine in a few days, and I brought him ibuprofen and put a towel under the corn so it wouldn't sweat on the cushions.

On the fifteenth I drove over to Sabine's with a heating pad because she had mastitis and couldn't get comfortable. I sat with those two babies for four hours so she could sleep. Rowan wouldn't take the bottle. Della slept on my chest the whole time and I didn't get up once, not even when my arm went numb, because she'd been up screaming since two in the morning and Sabine hadn't slept in three days.

I read the line again with my thumb under it, the way I do at work when a number looks wrong.

It wasn't wrong.

Headlights swung across the curtains. I heard the truck door, then the storm door, then his boots coming down the hall.

"What are you looking for?"

"Receipts from the clinic," I said.

He hung his jacket on the back of the chair. Then he came over and crouched down next to me on the floor and pulled the pile on the left toward himself.

"What year?" he said.