A man does not perform a cracking voice.

Except, I would learn, a man does — a certain kind of man, who has understood since childhood that the appearance of feeling buys you things that feeling itself does not, and who has practiced the appearance until it is seamless.

I did not know, in that first tender hour, that I had married that kind of man.

I found out in the second.

Chapter 2 — I Already Have a Son

He leaned close enough that no one in the hallway could have heard him.

“I already have a son with Nerissa,” he said.

“He was born four months ago.” For a second the words seemed to have landed in the wrong life.

Nerissa was his executive assistant — polished, quiet, always half a step behind him at company dinners with a tablet in her hands and a smile that never quite reached her eyes.

I had met her twice.

Once at a holiday drinks table, where she asked me how the nursery was coming and then excused herself before I could finish answering.

And now my husband was standing in a maternity room telling me she had had his child.

A son.

I looked down at my daughter.