Chapter 1

I put my hands on the table to stand when my husband told a banquet hall that somebody had believed in him.

Then he said another woman's name, and I clapped with a biopsy bandage pulling under my dress and six years of failed pregnancy tests still in our kitchen drawer.

The dinner was Businessman of the Year. County chamber. Two hundred people. I was in the third row in a black dress. His name is Brady. Mine is Nora. We have been married nine years.

That morning was not the dentist. A doctor put a needle into my left breast and took a piece out to test for cancer. I told Brady it was a cleaning so he could have his night. After the pictures I was going to tell him. After that, I thought, we would try again for a baby.

He stood at the microphone.

"Some people carry you," he said.

I have worked nights at the hospital for nine years so that company could stand. My paycheck went into it. I did the books at five in the morning before I slept. When one job could not make payroll, I put six weeks of it on my credit card.

I thought he meant me.

"Nine years ago I had a truck, a ladder, and a line of credit I had no business having." People laughed. "And I had somebody who believed in it before there was anything to believe in."

The room turned toward the tables. Cameras came up. I was ready to be looked at.

He said, "Shelby. Come on up here."

Shelby Renner has run the office at his company for fourteen months. I had met her twice. She was polite both times. She walked onto the stage in a green dress. He pulled her against his side the way a man pulls his wife into a photograph.

A waiter put champagne in front of her. She smiled, shook her head, and covered the glass with her hand.

Brady looked at that glass. Not at me.

The woman next to me leaned over. "Isn't that sweet."

"Yes," I said.

"She put that whole application together. You can't buy someone who cares like that."

"No," I said. "You can't."

The county paper took the picture with his arm around her. I was still in the third row, still clapping.

At ten he found me at the coat check.

"Did you hear it?"

"I heard it."

"The bank wants a meeting Thursday. Nine years, Nor."

"Nine years."

"You look pale."

I almost told him. They took a piece of me this morning. Come home. Tell me this is still the year we get a baby.

"I'm tired," I said.

"Go home and sleep." He was already looking past me. "I have to run by the yard. Somebody left the gate open."

"At ten o'clock at night?"

"That gate has forty thousand dollars of copper behind it."

He kissed my forehead. "Don't wait up."

I did not go home. My car was still in the hospital staff lot. I had come to the dinner straight from the biopsy. I went back to get the car.

I always use the north entrance, past the ambulance bay.

His white truck was parked at the emergency room. I know it by the dent in the tailgate.

The doors opened. Brady came out with his jacket off, holding a woman by the elbow.

It was Shelby. One hand lay flat on her stomach.

I am a nurse. I have seen that hand a thousand times. Women do not do that this early because they are showing. They do it because they are frightened for what is inside them.

He put his palm over her hand. Over the stomach. He used to do that to me in the fertility clinic parking lot, after another month that came back empty. Practicing.

There was something in there now.

He walked her to the door. He said something at her ear. She nodded and went in. He stood on the mat with his hand on the back of his neck. Then he followed her in.

I stood in the dark in the same black dress.

Then I did what I have done every night for nine years. I went in too.