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own ears. “I thought you’d change your mind eventually.”
    He drew back and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You agreed you didn’t want kids.”
    “I never said that,” I replied, wagging a finger. “I only said I understood how you felt, that it was okay, and that I wasn’t ready either. And I wasn’t—not at the time—but I honestly believed you’d feel differently by now.”
    Jake strode into the living room where he began to pace.
    I followed him in. “You’re angry.”
    His eyes lifted to meet mine. “Yes.”
    “Everything will be fine,” I tried to convince him. “I can handle this. We can handle this.”
    “You don’t know that,” he said with a frown. “And Christ, I’m not even going to be here! I’ll be halfway across the world!”
    We’d known for weeks about his deployment to Afghanistan. He was leaving at the end of the month and would be gone for nine months. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d lived apart. He was a soldier and it came with the territory. I’d never complained about it before and I certainly didn’t intend to start then.
    “I’ll have lots of support,” I told him. “Mom is less than an hour away and Sylvie is just across town.”
    He gave me a look. “You think Sylvie will be helpful?”
    “Maybe.” I hesitated. “I don’t know…”
    Jake sat down on the sofa and cupped his forehead in a hand. “God, I thought we were on the same page.”
    “We are. And I didn’t do this on purpose. It just happened. I don’t know how, but here we are.”
    He raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t want to do this again, Jenn. I can’t do it again.”
    I sat down beside him and laid my hand on his back.
    *
    Jake and I began dating five years ago, and early on he took me out to dinner, ordered a bottle of wine and told me he’d been married once before. I was shocked to hear it because he seemed too young to be divorced. Naturally I wanted to know what happened.
    He explained that he’d married his high school sweetheart at the age of twenty-one and everything was fine until she got pregnant.
    “All I ever wanted was to be a dad,” he told me as he poured us each a second glass of wine. “Then Chelsea had a rough pregnancy with terrible morning sickness. It put a strain on our relationship because she was always irritable and I was doing shift work, so I wasn’t much better. After the baby was born she started acting differently. At first it made no sense to me because all of a sudden, she’s was nothing like the girl I knew. She stopped taking showers and she was crying all the time. She always seemed angry with me, like I couldn’t do anything right. She blamed me for the smallest things—like if the corner of the carpet was curled up and she tripped on it, it was all my fault. How could I let that happen? Didn’t I care that she might get hurt? Didn’t I love her? That kind of thing. I figured out pretty quickly that it was postpartum depression. At least she went to see her doctor about it.”
    He stopped talking for a moment, fingered the stem of his wine glass and seemed lost in thought.
    “I’m sorry you went through all that,” I gently said.
    He nodded. “Thanks. Anyway…things just went downhill from there.”
    “How?”
    He took another sip of his wine and kept his eyes on the table as he spoke. “One night we went to bed exhausted, which was pretty typical because one of us was always up every couple of hours for bottle feedings—”
    “She didn’t breast feed?”
    “No,” he replied, shaking his head, “which was a good thing for me because I got to feed Ava, too, and that was great. I loved doing it. Anyway, we slept like the dead, both of us, all night long. Chelsea woke up when the sun came in the window. She asked if I’d gotten up to feed Ava, but I hadn’t, and somehow we both just knew. Don’t ask me how. You’d think we’d be happy that our child had slept through the night