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blowing it off as if she got into a fender bender with you or something. This is anything but simple and you know it. I can’t believe you’re both just trying to sweep it under the rug.”
    David leaned forward. “What good comes of this? All it does is upset two stable families that have been getting along fine otherwise.”
    “Still, you think you can act like you don’t know you may have a daughter walking around, one who has your eyes and wants to know who her father is? How can you be so selfish?”
    “Hey,” he threatened.
    “You have to
know
,” I pressed. “We all do.”
    “And what about
you
?” he said, annoyed. “You’ve been adamant all along about not having kids. Why are you the voice of reason in this? You suddenly want a teenage girl in our lives?”
    I slunk away from him and stood up. “I seem to be the only one who does at the moment. Look, David, this situation scares me to death. But we have to meet it head-on.”
    We seemed to be in a face-off, each of us locked into a scowl.
    “You gonna come back to bed, or are you just gonna stand there?” he asked me. I felt like pummeling him.
    I stayed put.
    “Andi, I can’t do anything more about it tonight, so will you come back to bed so we can get some sleep? It’s been a long day and I’m exhausted.”
    I was exhausted too.
    David extended his arm. “Please? I’m sorry.”
    I reluctantly climbed back into bed. He folded me into his arms and kissed my forehead, apologizing again. I kissed him one more time; he smelled of cologne and sex.
    “I love you,” I said before adding, “jerk.”
    He broke into a grin. “Backatcha,” he teased. I turned out the light and we snuggled under the sheets. But I don’t think either of us accomplished anything more than the occasional dozing.

chapter seven
    We hadn’t spoken about Wylie, or her genes, since she’d appeared in the backyard two days ago. Danced around it with banal conversation and feigned preoccupation with the beginning of the fall semester and daily chores. But I couldn’t go five minutes without thinking of her, in those Daisy Dukes and flip-flops and purple strand of hair, as a child seeking validation. I couldn’t stop imagining her sitting at the butcher-block table, eating more than just leftovers. If I was so consumed with these thoughts and feelings, then what was David going through? And how could he so willingly avoid it? How could I let him?
    I entered the study, where David was sitting in the recliner, reading, and I approached the easel in the opposite corner. He had always considered painting to be a hobby, a form of relaxation. When I had asked him why he didn’t sell his work, he insisted that he’d be laughed out of the very galleries he’d so successfully managed and patronized. He wasn’t “a natural,” he insisted. He had begun this latest canvas a few months ago, a Manet-style landscape of the Harvard campus. I studied it, letting my pupils go in and out of focus at the fleeting brushstrokes (a phrase from David’s first essay that I’d never forgotten), looking as if they’d been painted with such ferocity,except I knew better. I knew the hand that held the brush and made those quick, darting movements—enough for you to miss them if you weren’t looking—in a quiet room (he’d gone to Harvard to sketch the scene and study the light, but preferred to work at home). He set up drop cloths in the space around him, although usually he worked in his Cambridge apartment, having converted one of the rooms into a studio, furniture and flooring be damned.
    I suddenly found myself wondering what went through his mind when he painted. Were his thoughts just as quick and darting? Did his mind wander off to his to-do list or e-mail inbox, or did he get the way I do when I write—lost in the scene, in an endless
now
, listening to the voices of characters rather than my own inner voice?
    “You like?” he asked, startling me.
    “It’ll be beautiful when