Valentine's Day had sucked.

Mari had expected nothing less of the holiday, really. She had girlfriends who were usually there for a study break or a party, and there was Nancy, of course, but...

Nancy.

Mari dreaded going over to Nancy's house the day after. She was still in a bad mood from the day before. Thomas had been in the dining hall with another girl, and Mari had sat out of their sight, picking at her food, her rounding belly hidden under a baggy sweatshirt and loose-fitting carpenter jeans. Her parents had called, and she had been tense during the entire conversation, as though some turn of phrase or accent in her words would communicate to them the trouble she was in. And the last thing she wanted was to go over to Nancy and Ned's house and see the aftermath of their celebration of Valentine's Day, the roses and empty bottles of wine or cider or whatever, the look of adoration that could pass between them, not when Thomas was walking around with some other girl whose stomach was flat and eyes were bright.

The last sheaf of papers was on her desk, awaiting her signature, and those of the adopted parents she had chosen for her baby. Her little girl.

Mari called ahead, which was a good thing, because Nancy was moody. Today, though, she was bright, happy to have Mari come over for a while around dinnertime.

Mari had been spending a lot of time over at the Nickersons', but she was having crying fits (for absolutely no reason, she told herself sternly), and whenever she was there Nancy seemed to vascillate between accusation and adoration toward her husband. With everything else that was going on, Mari thought it best if she limit the time she spent with them. Sometimes Ned had obviously been sleeping on the couch, sometimes he was in the guest bedroom, and sometimes she had been startled to find him staring intently at the television in the study, hands glued to the controller, his jaw set tight.

Nancy had confided that a good deal of the time she just wanted Ned to keep his hands off her and stay the hell away from her. Mari, for her part, would have paid good money to be in a situation where she could even consider refusing something like obvious physical attraction between Nancy and Ned, but she couldn't really blame her. Half the time she lay awake in bed trying to get to sleep, she was plotting ways to kill the man who had gotten her into this situation.

When she arrived, it seemed that Nancy was doing the same. Mari had a key and knew the access code by heart, and when she walked in Nancy was sitting on the living room couch, arms crossed over her chest, mouth a straight thin line, her cheeks flushed red. The silence in the room was almost deafening. Ned was sitting at the table in the dining room, still eating, but Nancy's half-emptied plate was pushed aside, her napkin in a crumpled ball.

Did I come at a bad time rose to Mari's lips, but Nancy had waved off such questions before. There was no bad time for Mari to come over, she had told her time and time again. Seemed like recently, though, that times had been bad for Ned to come over.

In a flash Nancy's almost pointedly good mood was back, and she was offering Mari something to drink, a place to sit. Ned flashed Mari an apologetic smile and she almost felt badly for him.

She looked at the two of them, the parents she had chosen for the baby she still sometimes couldn't believe she was actually having. Sure, things were strained between them, if Nancy felt half as moody as she. And then they would drop the thirty-pound weights hanging off their chests, and life would go back to normal.

She gave them the brightest smile she could muster, and dug the papers out of her backpack.

--

It's normal, they all said.

They all. Ned snorted. No wonder he and Nancy were only children. Any couple having to put up with a pregnancy the first time would hardly be sane or rational if they considered another. He couldn't do anything right, as far as she was concerned. And they had been fighting, the kind of fights he had thought ended during their courtship. Hysterical accusations and crying jags and stony silence.

Ahh, but then there was also the withholding of sex, which he definitely hadn't had to endure during their courtship. Can't withhold something never promised.

He sighed to himself and pressed the button on the elevator.

If the pattern held, tonight she'd be all over him. Maybe. Maybe. Unless he looked at her slightly wrong, breathed a bit too loudly, said something unintentionally offensive. Then he'd be on the couch, or worse.

The elevator slid open. Danielle Cartier was walking down the corridor, heels clicking on the floor, thin tight sweater and black skirt. She glanced in his direction, then did a double-take and shot him a smile, gold hair shining, green eyes wide and sparkling as they stared up into his.

"Good morning," he told her.

"Good morning," she replied, giving him the barest nod of her head before the swish of her skirt followed her.

--

"Four more months," Nancy sighed heavily, easing into the booth.

George looked amused. "Yeah, and I thought you wanted a baby."

"Silly you," Nancy retorted. "No tennis, no strenuous activity, no cases involving serial killers or gang murders because my heart rate may rise to unbearable levels..."

"And yet you're still allowed to have sex?" George asked.

Nancy snorted. "We don't," she replied. "Well, not for the past week, anyway. Half the time when I look at him I just wish he'd drop dead."

"You must be a joy and delight to hang out with." George sipped at her water, then nodded when the waitress approached their table.

When they had decided on a grilled chicken salad for George and an entire medium pizza for Nancy, the waitress promised a basket of rolls and headed for the kitchen, narrowly avoiding a tray full of drinks on their way to another table. Nancy put her cell phone on the table and sipped her own water, staring at it.

George nodded at the phone. "Expecting a call from Ned?"

"No," Nancy replied, her voice flat. She flushed slightly, then looked up. "Let's go out this weekend."

"All of us?"

"No, we can do a girls night. No husbands. I can be designated driver. I just want to get out of the house, get away from it, go somewhere we can have some fun."

George was nodding in agreement when Nancy's gaze strayed back to her silent phone.

--

Ned thought he'd managed to get away from their table in the bar undetected. Mike was telling an elaborate story Ned had heard a thousand times before, involving a pet snake and the fraternity mixer party their junior year and the tank of helium they'd had out back, and everyone was staring at him, mouths wide. But Ned caught Samantha tossing her hair out of the corner of his eye, and she groaned. The sound was overloud, playful. Dark hair, creamy shoulders, shining red silk top. She had been his secretary before one of the more infamous poker nights. She still smiled at him in the hallways, but that was at work and this was most definitely not work, not with the way his fingers and toes felt numb and slightly tingling. Not with the thin sheen of perspiration on her forehead, the exaggeration of her movements.

"Have another round," she told him, hazel eyes wide, lashes batting at the air. "Don't leave just yet."

He shrugged apologetically. "Have to," he said. Because if he had another drink he wouldn't be able to find his car, much less drive it home.

The thought of his car made him angry again. Nancy was insisting that he trade it in on a minivan. A damn minivan. He'd asked why they wouldn't trade hers in, or better why they'd even need to trade in a car at all. He could afford to buy as many minivans as she felt like having. She'd launched into some tirade about how he wasn't responsible or ready to settle down unless he was going to make sacrifices for their child, and he'd shot back something about working all those years to provide a house to an ungrateful...

Things had gotten ugly after that. Uglier, really. They'd been pretty bad to start out with.

He left anyway, before a shot could set him back thirty minutes or another hour. All the guys thinking he was going home to a wife who would meet him at the door, take him by the hand, and lead him upstairs for a night wilder than the ones Samantha was rumored to provide. Nancy should get on her damn knees in thanks that he hadn't taken another round, taken another hint, and ended up with Samantha's blackened eyelashes fluttering against his thighs.

But she wouldn't know.

Nancy was working out when he came home. Thin white t-shirt hugging the bulge in her belly, navy sweatpants ending in gleaming white tennis shoes, hair pulled back into a sweaty ponytail and the flush of exertion in her cheeks. She didn't say anything to him. He went to the kitchen, drew himself a large tumbler of iced water, and watched her idly as he drank it.

When her workout was over she stopped the tape and turned off the VCR, headed upstairs, and Ned flipped through the channels and watched snippets of news. Missing children, court cases, drug busts, the stock market news. His buzz was wearing off. Nancy was in the shower.

He could go upstairs and surprise her.

He snapped off the television, the downstairs lights, set the keypad correctly after three tries, made his way up the stairs. She was already finished with her shower. The sound of the hairdryer caused a dull throbbing in the back of his head. He tossed his clothes at the hamper and was sitting in his shorts at the foot of the bed when she came out of the bathroom, her robe wrapped around her.

"I'm sorry," he said in greeting.

She tilted her head, watching him warily.

"You were right, I was wrong."

"About what?"

"About everything."

He earned a smile, at that. A brief, small one, but a smile nonetheless. "About time you learned."

He opened his arms, willing her to step closer. "And we will go when you're free and pick out the best minivan ever. DVD player, stereo system, convertible, whatever you want."

She laughed. "There are no convertible minivans."

"There are if you want there to be. My girl gets whatever she wants."

She sat down next to him, his arm around her shoulders, gazing at him, and he had the disquieting feeling that she was actually looking at him and seeing him for the first time in days. Her eyes were twinkling. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. "Thanks," she said. "And I'm sorry I blew up."

"Which time?" he asked, then clapped his hand to the side of his head. "Forget I said that. Blanket apology accepted."

She nodded, and closed her eyes when he kissed her cheek in return.

--

The relative peace of the following day was interrupted not by some Freudian slip of the tongue or misplaced sigh on his part, but Nancy's deceptively casual remark, as she was clearing the dishes from dinner.

"I'm sorry?" he replied, disbelieving his ears.

"I have to go out of town for a few days," she repeated, slowly, with a hint of exasperation in her voice. Ned stared at the back of her head, the magazine he'd been browsing forgotten on the table.

"Why?" His voice sounded dumb in his own ears.

"Work," she said. "A case. A job. It'll only be for a few days. You can survive off fast food and your mother's cooking for that long."

"And you're leaving when, tomorrow morning?"

"Tonight, actually."

He found himself speechless. Not because the words weren't there, but because there were too many, all of which, when he picked back through like a choose your own adventure ending, resulted in slammed doors and red-faced screaming.

"Oh," he trusted himself to say. Then, in a curiously calculated gesture, "I'll miss you."

For the first time since he'd come home that night he could actually feel her gaze on him, searching out his eyes. Her own were guarded. "Of course you will," she said lightly.

It's started, he remembered her whispering.

I can feel it, he thought, and it trembled on his lips. You're starting to slip away from me.

She turned away from him and continued loading the dishwasher. He gazed down at the dull magazine pages, unseeing.

--

Mike and Jan O'Shea were the ones who pulled him out of the house, eventually. He had a feeling that if Nancy called and found he was out at a bar, she would chew him out in no uncertain terms, even though he hadn't been given the name of the hotel where she'd be staying or any flight information.

Assuming there had been a flight.

He shrugged off the feeling and tucked the phone into the pocket over his heart, all the better to feel it ring. Some of his friends from work showed up, and he played a game of pool with them, nursing his beer. Certain that at any minute he would need to be sober enough to hold a conversation with her, to leave if she so insisted. Something.

Samantha was there, again, hanging onto Joel's arm, laughing up into his eyes.

He felt a homesickness for his wife so fiercely that it startled him. He wanted Nancy to be there, laughing up into his eyes, all double meanings and black silk like she had been in Paris. But the whole reason it worked was because his associates hadn't seen her like that, hadn't really seen her at all. Only Mason had been there at the bar in Paris, and if he saw Nancy here tonight he'd hardly recognize her.

He wondered about the nights she came home late, the nights he came home still pleasantly buzzing to find her already asleep in their bed or waiting up for him, strained fear on her face. She didn't go out with him. She called it his time to hang out with his friends. All the better if they came over for poker nights, except the ones she didn't approve of, the ones who made the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

Nancy would never stand like Samantha was. Not before and not since. She wouldn't come out to the club in a thin strapped tank top and black leather miniskirt, dark nailpolish and practiced stare and the fluid grind of her body against his as they danced. Not the Nancy he was married to.

Especially not now.

Maybe once the baby was born. He counted off on his fingers, groaning. Four months.

A cheer rose from the other side of the bar. Ned looked over just in time to see Danielle throw another dart, hear the answering cries. She was smiling broadly, and for a second she looked in his direction. Their gazes locked, and he nodded his head at her, gave her a congratulatory smile.

She nodded back at him ever so slightly, her lips curling up.

Ned felt a hand on his and looked over, startled. Jan, her hair piled up on her head, a good natured grin on her face, beamed up at him. "Come dance," she said.

Mike was busy at the pool table. Ned shrugged, smiled down at his best friend's wife, and headed out to the floor with her.

--

Danielle stamped crusted snow off her boots as she walked back into the lobby of the office building. The automatic doors swished shut behind her, and a compensatory blast of warm air ruffled her hair back from her wind-reddened face.

Sometimes she wondered why she stayed in Chicago.

She glanced around the lobby as she headed for the stairs. The security guard gave her a smile and waved her on.

Against the wall, next to a potted plant, sat the lone other occupant. A woman, about Danielle's age, dressed in an ice-blue sweater that didn't make any attempt to disguise the curve of her breast or round of her belly, black skirt, black leather boots that left only her knee peeking out. Her legs were crossed, a deep grey wool duster was folded neatly on the seat next to her, and her hair cascaded down her shoulders. Danielle thought she was just staring at her coat until she saw a cell phone blossom to silent light from its folds, and the woman's face lit up as she picked it up and manipulated the buttons.

Danielle summoned the elevator and stood waiting for it, rubbing her hands together briskly. The woman stood, and for a second grasped the edge of her chair, her other hand sliding down to rest on the front of her belly.

Pregnant, Danielle thought.

Only then did Danielle notice the rings on the woman's finger. She picked up her coat and tied it tightly around her, slipped the cell phone into her pocket, and stood with her arms crossed, gazing in the direction of the elevators. When she caught Danielle's eye for a second, she smiled, then returned to her vigil.

The chime startled Danielle, and she turned to see the doors sliding back smoothly, her reflection slid aside to show Ned standing alone in the car. Automatically she smiled.

But Ned had no answering smile for her. Already his gaze was beyond her, locked on the woman in the dark grey coat, who (Danielle didn't even need to look behind her to see, but she did anyway) was answering his smile with one of her own.

Ned's wife. Ned's pregnant wife.

The doors whispered shut, but not before Danielle saw Ned wrap his arms around the woman, her eyes closing in response.

Danielle closed her own eyes as the car slid upward.

That should've been me.

--

Ned woke that night, startled to consciousness from some loud noise in his dream. Danielle was taking her last drink of the night, halfway across Chicago; Nancy was on her side of his bed, one arm folded under her head, on her back but tilted toward him. Her face was smooth and lineless.

While he was staring at her she opened her eyes and gazed back at him.

Her eyes were dull with sleep, but she was aware of him, aware of the angles of his face in the dark. She blinked and he reached out for her, cupped her cheek in his palm, felt the smooth curve of her skin. Her lips curved up.

He felt like he could reach out and touch her, then. Like he could tell her about all the misunderstood gestures and his insecurities and the cool detachment he had obviously misinterpreted, and she would laugh, and they would be back in the warm comfort of that afternoon, listening to the wind whistle around the corners of the house while they held each other.

But he was silent, speechless.

He lay next to her and she put her arms around him, recovering her breath, and he looped his arm over her, pressed his face close to hers. She was there, the old Nancy, as he remembered her, a soft laugh under her breath, her fingers twined in the hair at the back of his neck.

He sighed. "I love you," he murmured, and it had nothing to do with the sex they'd just had, five hours or five minutes before, everything to do with the safety he felt in her embrace.

"Love you too," she whispered, brushing a kiss against the corner of his mouth.

--

She was gone the next morning.

Mentally, at least. She had been replaced while they slept twined around each other by her more short-tempered twin, and this version found a reasonable question about the dry-cleaning and its pickup to be an unforgivable breech of conduct on his part. He'd even offered to go pick it up himself, but his even suggesting that her job was so disposable that she could just go at his whim and do his bidding made her little better than his slave, because maybe what he wanted, she spat, venomous, was for her to stay home and be his slave all day. She already had dinner ready when he came home

(assuming she was home, he helpfully supplemented, his own mood growing dark)

and washed his clothes and kept the house clean, and even if their income didn't depend on any large way on her going to work every day

(it didn't depend at all on what she did, his salary already single-handedly could have covered the bills several times over)

it was important. She wasn't the one going out with her friends all the time. In fact, she was convinced that his friends didn't like her at all and would much rather have preferred her stay home, waiting for him, as his slave. Even if she did go, it wasn't like she could enjoy herself by having a couple, and was relegated to being the designated driver, a thankless task if ever there was one, chauffering around a bunch of nauseated frat boys.

He drove to work, a sour taste blooming in his mouth the entire way, shouting epithets at other drivers that he'd had to hold back from shouting at his wife.

By the time he was at his desk and able to think, he had begun to feel depressed. He wasn't entirely unfamiliar with it; he had spent a lot of time in this very office thinking about her, wondering what she was doing, while they had been apart. But even then it had been tempered with the hope that maybe he had it wrong, there had been some kind of misunderstanding, and everything was just temporarily out of balance. Which it had been.

But this depression...

He looked down at the ring on his left hand. He knew it was ridiculous to be feeling this way, as if the moodiness that accompanied her pregnancy was something he couldn't abide any longer. He was extremely responsible for her state. But even an argument about something so small (damn dry cleaning) would have been all right if he could just fight the suspicion that fluttered in the back of his mind. The suspicion that had seemed so entirely ludicrous the afternoon and night before.

He closed his eyes. It wasn't supposed to be like this. She was supposed to be flushed and happy and suffering from mild morning sickness and picking out little one-piece jumpers and teddy bears, not yelling at him when he even suggested that she might perhaps pick up the dry cleaning.

--

When he came home after work, the

(damndrycleaning was what he mentally called it now, all one bitter word)

looped over his shoulder in its plastic clinging slips, he was only slightly surprised to find the house still dark and cold. Nothing was obviously marinating or standing for dinner. He took the newly cleaned clothes upstairs and hung them up, railing at himself for not throwing them across the back of the couch and just waiting for her abuse to begin. He made himself half a sandwich, ears pricked and waiting to hear her walk through the front door, angry that he hadn't waited for dinner. A game show had started on television and he watched it, preoccupied by the inevitable diatribe on how he didn't want to eat with her and hated her cooking, or some other entirely unwarranted rant on his eating a sandwich.

The phone rang. Well, at least if she started yelling he could hold it away from his ear. He sighed and answered it.

"Hey man, you still up for the game on Sunday?"

"Sure," Ned replied, his blood pressure falling, his mood brightening considerably. "How's it going?"

Mike shrugged, and Ned could feel it. "Not bad," he said. "We're about to sit down to dinner, if you want to come over."

Nancy's invitation was implied, but Ned didn't really care. "I'll be over in a minute," he said.

Mike chuckled under his breath. "Problems?"

"Nah. She's not even home yet."

After dinner his cell phone was still silent and their house was still dark. Ned and Mike sat down on the living room couch, watching sports recaps and drinking beers.

"Did Jan go insane once she got pregnant?" Ned asked.

Mike and Jan had a pair of five-year-old twin boys. Mike looked over at them for a moment.

"A little," he admitted. "She wanted weird food all the time, she'd cry at the drop of a hat, yell at me for no reason..."

"So it's normal."

Mike shrugged. "She calmed down once the kids were born. Why, is Nancy wanting pistachio ice cream in the middle of the night?"

Ned took a swig of his beer. "One minute she's all over me and the next I'm the worst thing that's ever happened to her."

Mike's lips tightened slightly but that was the only negative response he made. He replied with something to the effect that Ned's experience wasn't at all abnormal, and to expect more of the same.

But the implication was there and Ned could feel it. Mike hadn't said a bad word about Nancy since the day he'd told his old friend that he was seeing his high school sweetheart again, but Ned's recall of Mike's reaction to her leaving was crystal clear. Mike had set Ned up on dates, double-dated with him, encouraged him to get out and have fun and let Nancy be history, since that's what she had obviously wanted to be.

He didn't think about it, too much, not normally. He didn't let himself start to consider it. But he cracked another beer and watched Mike's face when he saw Jan, and he thought about it again.

She had known where he was. She was a private detective, for God's sake, if she'd wanted to find him she could have. And she hadn't, she'd left him to run into her by chance on a business trip. What if he hadn't gone, what if she hadn't been there in that restaurant, what if he'd never...

Because their entire life together, now, depended on a set of chance events, and he knew what Mike would never voice: he had been a fool to take Nancy back.

Especially with her sudden business trip, and (he glanced out the window to confirm) her inexplicable time between work and home where she seemed to fall off the face of the earth and have every cheerful excuse available later.

His hands were shaking.

--

If she had any luck at all Ned would be asleep. His car was in the driveway but the house itself was dark.

She was so, so very quiet as she walked up to the front door, quiet as a housebreaker, as she tossed her coat over the couch, stepped out of her shoes on the carpet, made her way in bare feet up the stairs. She held a palm against the frame of the door as she turned the doorknob of their bedroom by degrees, her breath shallow and noiseless, and then eased the door open.

The bed was still made, and Ned wasn't in it.

--

A faint buzzing headache, infuriated by the fluorescent lights, was the only physical remainder of the night before. Ned ran a hand over his face as he yawned, watching the elevator chime off the floors as they passed.

He had slept alone.

He might have been drunk when he finally realized that his wife's car was in the driveway, but the anger he'd felt at that sight wouldn't be denied by such details. He'd made his way across the road, fueled by a strong desire to grab her and shake her by the arms until she apologized. For anything and everything and whatever he happened to mention.

They struck him at the same time, the jarring vision of their kitchen as a lit rectangle when he had expected the house to be dark, and her voice, or rather the low flirtatious giggle. And not directed at him.

When he demanded to know who she'd been talking to before she abruptly hung up the phone and faced him, it didn't go like he'd planned. Not at all. She asked where he'd been, he asked where she'd been, if she'd been with the voice on the other side of the line, she'd sniffed at him accusingly and said he was an alcoholic and in his rage he had looked around for something, anything, to throw, to break, to crash on the floor, and realized the thing he most wanted to do that to was her.

"Hi."

Danielle was in a black cashmere sweater and grey pants today, but his eyes were drawn to her lips, a vivid dash of color on her face. She looked faintly amused, but not condescendingly. He didn't think he could have dealt with that, just then.

"Hi," he replied.

--

Ned stopped talking to Mike about it, eventually. He didn't stop thinking about it and he seethed when Nancy wasn't home, when she made some light excuse that became defensive when he pressed it.

He sensed Danielle's eyes on him often.

On weeks when Nancy's mood swings were intolerable, sometimes he'd return her gaze.

They agreed, finally, to keep both their frivilous sports cars, and buy a fully loaded minivan with leather seats and a DVD player. Midori came to visit her little sister, and when Mari gave birth she named her daughter Hana. Hana with her jet-black hair and startling green eyes.

When Nancy gave birth a month and a half later, she named her first child Helene. Dark brown hair, sapphire blue eyes. She called them her Irish twins.

And for that time, when the babies arrived, he thought maybe the temporary insanity that had marred her pregnancy for him, was over.