Page 42 of You Can't Hurt Me

“No doubt at all, I know she was.” He lets out a short bitter laugh, gives me a shattered look. It’s difficult not to feel sorry for him. His love for her etched in his crushed expression. My empathy lay with Eva for so long, but now I’m not so sure.

“It must have been hard for you to carry all that alone. Does Priya know?”

An uneasy silence falls between us.

“Priya,” I repeat slowly, and as I do, I think of that picture, the rage that passed across his features when he caught me in Eva’s study. “She took that photo, didn’t she?”

He nods. “They were always close friends, and for a long time, I never suspected anything...”

“And she knows you knew about them?”

“No, she’d be horrified if I knew,” he says quickly. “It’s our secret, Anna, you understand that? It can never be part of the memoir we create.”

Create. That word snags on me briefly, but I let it go, in favor of the other word:we. I nod, but I still feel there’s something he isn’t telling me.

“Of course. Can I ask, how did you find out?”

“How everyone finds out: by accident. If you believe in accidents.”

“You think she wanted you to discover them?”

“At some level, yes. I believe anyone who has an affair always does. It’s a catalyst. So they can be forgiven or punished or released, or whatever it is they’re really searching for. But it wasn’t the affair that upset me most. That was only one part of what I discovered that day,” he says darkly, before we’re interrupted by his phone. It vibrates, lights up with a message, and he glances at it. For a moment I’m afraid I’m losing him.

“You can tell me, Nate,” I press. He looks at me uncertainly, lost for words.

“What happened?”

“One afternoon I came home without telling her. Never a good idea. I’d been preparing a lecture I was really excited about, the results of a breakthrough we’d made in identifying a particular gene, SCN9A. An hour or two before I was supposed to leave, I realized I had the wrong notes. Somehow, I’d printed out an old version and forgotten to pick up the new one stored on my home computer. I called Eva to email them to me but she didn’t answer. So I rushed back.”

“And found them together?”

“Worse than that. I think that would have been easier somehow. After I found my papers, I went to the bathroom before leaving the house. And that’s when I saw it, on the surface next to the basin.”

He pauses, takes another breath.

“I thought it was a thermometer at first, lying there on its side, until I turned it over. There it was. That miracle hormone HCG.”

“HCG,” I repeat. “Pregnant.”

He nods, his features strained. “The thin blue line in all its glory. It was pretty miraculous, given that we barely had sex that year. By the end I felt as if we inhabited two separate islands with no way to row back. Instead, we left the gap open for someone else to walk in, another reason I can’t help but blame myself for her affair with Priya.” He shakes his head. “But then finding this...”

“The pregnancy test,” I press on. “What was the problem, you didn’t want to have a baby?”

“To the contrary. I was thrilled when I saw it. I was ready to be a father. I thought, here is this miracle that could bring us back together after years of drifting apart. Naively I assumed she might feel the same way. But as soon as I saw her expression later when I confronted her about it, I knew something was horribly wrong. She froze.”

“And?”

“She told me, very calmly, that she didn’t want to have this baby, that she didn’t want to raise a child with CIP, for its sake as well as ours, knowing the mortality risks involved. We both knew the chance of inheriting her condition was fifty percent. I suggested genetic testing, reminded her that this was an opportunity, but she’d made up her mind.

“She had planned to keep the whole thing a secret from me. I tried to persuade her. I said I’d be willing to take a sabbatical, go part-time, whatever it would take to make it easier for her. She gave me this look, a sort of, ‘you just don’t get it, do you?’ expression. I was upset, dumbfounded. Then she said there was something else she wanted to tell me.”

“About Priya?” The photo of her flashes brightly in my mind, their arms sloped around each other.

He stares out across the dining room. “I was angry, of course, at the deception and infidelity. But then something else, something I didn’t expect. Relief, maybe?”

“Why is that? Unless...you were having an affair too?”

“Honestly, I think it felt like something had lifted, that suddenly it wasn’t my fault it had all gone so hopelessly wrong. Now I was absolved. In the end that’s all that marriage boils down to, blame. What you can avoid, what you can stick on the other person. She blamed her affair on me. I remember her saying, ‘Any wife would do the same. I sit in trainee sessions listening to client problems and I think, if only you knew. I’m the one who needs therapy. Someone to help me understand my fucked-up work-obsessed husband.’” Nate recoils, looking pale and weary in the gray light.

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