“Absolutely not.” She punched him in the arm. “And also, none of your damn business.”
So the next time George invited Finn to go golfing, Finn accepted. He promised Caitlin he’d broach the subject, let George know that it was no big deal, that it was a small thing to do that would mean something big to Cait. When they returned home that afternoon, she came out to the driveway to greet them, calling out cheerfully that she’d made a fresh pitcher of Tom Collinses and put up the patio umbrella.
Finn was unloading their golf bags from the trunk of George’s SUV, one slung over each shoulder. As he reached to close the heavy rear door, his eyes met Caitlin’s and he shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“I don’t know why,” he told her later. “Are you sure George wants kids?”
“Of course I’m sure. Why? Did he act like he didn’t?”
Finn raised his hands, palms up. “I honestly didn’t get that vibe. But he was pretty opposed to the test, and I couldn’t figure out why. He seems to think it’s unnatural or something, that it will happen on its own if it’s meant to be. And maybe it will, Cait. How long have you guys been trying?”
“Since our honeymoon,” she said quietly. “Years.”
Finn put his hand on her arm. “I’m sorry.”
And then, a few weeks later, Violet and Finn threw their party.
George was out of town on business, as usual. She’d let him go without argument, without reminding him that the trip fell across the fertile days in her cycle, that they’d be skipping yet another whole month of trying. She was tired of arguing.
So Caitlin went alone to Finn and Violet’s party. Actually, thinking back now, she knew Violet was right to have corrected herself earlier—it was Violet who’d been so enthusiastic about the idea of the party, and Finn who had grudgingly gone along with it. Secretly, Caitlin had worried that he felt awkward about friends who’d known Maribel coming to a party to meet his new girlfriend. His social pool had diminished, anyway, after the tragedy—Caitlin never knew how much of that was his own doing, him keeping everyone at arm’s length, and how much of it was them avoiding Finn because of what he’d inadvertently done. In any case, Finn invited hardly anyone to the barbecue in his own backyard. There was Caitlin, of course, and the wedding photographer he worked for, and a handful of former coworkers, but no one, Caitlin noticed, whom he’d ever been particularly close to.
Violet, however, seemed to have invited everyone she knew. She often joked that practically all her friends had gotten married in the past couple of years, and Caitlin could see now that not only was Violet not exaggerating, but that the group of them had moved on to phase two—never had she seen so many pregnant women in one place. Caitlin got drunk out of belly envy. And in that drunkenness, she grew from being confused and hurt by George’s behavior to being angry, really angry, with George—George who was so far away right now, with a baby or a stupidly easy sperm count test the farthest possible things from his mind, when they wouldn’t stop weighing on Caitlin’s own. It all suddenly seemed impossibly unfair. And when Finn introduced her to Kevin, the assistant professor at the university, a lightbulb of recognition went off in her brain. Super Sperm. And that lightbulb turned flirtatious. It was almost too easy. He will sleep with anything that walks, Finn had said.
In the kitchen as the guests started to leave, Finn pulled her aside. “Do not do this, Cait,” he said quietly. “Go home.”
And Caitlin did go home—with Kevin trailing behind her through the grass to her back door, Finn watching them out the window with his forehead creased in ugly frown lines.
The funny thing was that not once did Caitlin think of sleeping with Kevin as true infidelity, as an act of intimacy beyond her marital bed. She simply thought of him as a means to an end. If George’s sperm would not do the job, eventually the two of them might need to seek a sperm donor anyway—which is what Super Sperm was. In fact, if he’d participated in that study for three whole months, and if his sperm really was so legendarily “super,” wasn’t there a decent chance that if she ended up at a sperm bank, the DNA would be his anyway?
It was never all that hard to rationalize your way through doing something wrong when it was a way to get what you wanted.
She didn’t stop to think about the ramifications of getting pregnant with someone else’s child. She didn’t think about the baby who would not be George’s and how she would live with that secret—if she could keep it a secret—for the rest of her life. She thought only about how she wanted to be a mother and didn’t want to miss her chance just because George had too much macho pride to get a routine test done.
It was indeed fortunate that she had not, for once, whined to George that he was going out of town during her fertile days, had not begged to tag along and been denied. Because he believed that she got pregnant the next week, when he got back. His count was off by only a few days, not enough that he ever questioned the timing of her first ultrasound at six weeks to confirm the pregnancy. And when she saw not one but two tiny heartbeats blinking on the monitor, she couldn’t resist, just for a split second, a flash of satisfaction that Super Sperm had lived up to his name.
As far as she knew, Finn had never told Violet what had happened. And she presumed, thank God, that he’d never told Kevin about the result of their little indiscretion either. If he had, Kevin must not have cared, because he’d never shown up at her door.
And Caitlin and Finn had never discussed it. Not until the day he stood in her kitchen, his kidnapped son playing in the twins’ room upstairs, and demanded she give him the keys to the cabin with the words she could hardly believe she was hearing.
“If you don’t, I’m going to tell George.”
Caitlin confessed it all to Violet, point by point. The cabin was still a couple hours away, and nothing could be worse than that accusatory silence between them, so Caitlin spared no detail. By the time she got to the part where she’d returned from the heartbreaking days at Violet’s, had the power outage disrupt her first day back at work, and gotten home to find Finn and Bear in her house, her eyes were filled with guilty tears. But there was nothing she could do but hope that something in her friend still had the compassion to understand.
When she finished, the silence resumed. Caitlin squirmed in her seat. The worst was that there was more to come. That she hadn’t even gotten into what George’s father had done for Finn, after the accident, and how Finn had threatened to use it against him, against them all. That wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have—there was so much other air to clear about Maribel. But she would. She just had to finish this one first.