So it was just the two of us at the kitchen table. Adam had his tie loosened. I was cutting him a second slice.

“Graham wants to be a dad,” Adam said.

I looked up.

“Okay?”

Graham Whitlock was Adam’s boss. The vice president of operations at the logistics company where Adam had worked for nine years. I’d met him maybe four times. At Christmas parties. At a company picnic once. He was in his early forties, quiet, very polite, always dressed like he’d just stepped out of a catalog. He’d once complimented my earrings and then asked me thoughtful questions about my job for twenty minutes, which almost nobody does.

“That’s nice,” I said. “Good for him.”

Adam reached for the slice I’d just cut.

“He’s looking for a surrogate,” he said. “I told him how much you loved being pregnant with Sophie.”

I put down the knife.

“Why would you tell him that?”

Adam hesitated. He picked a silver sprinkle off the top of his cake and looked at it.

“He asked,” he said. “He asked if you might consider doing it for him.”

I stared at him.

“Carrying his baby?”

“Yes.”

“And you told him I might agree? Without asking me first?”

“I wasn’t agreeing to anything for you, Hazel,” he said quickly. “I swear. I just said you might be interested. That you had an easy pregnancy. That you loved it. Which you did.”

I had loved it. That was true.

I’d loved being pregnant with Sophie. Even the bad parts. Even the heartburn and the swollen ankles and the night I cried in the cereal aisle because they were out of the kind of granola I wanted. I loved feeling her move. I loved talking to her in the car. I loved lying in the bathtub watching my stomach roll and jump like there was a tiny gymnast in there.

But I’d loved it because she was mine. Because I was going to hold her at the end.

“That’s a strange thing to tell your boss,” I said.

Adam stood up and came around the table.

He slipped his arms around my waist from behind and rested his chin on my shoulder. He smelled like coffee and his work cologne.

“He said we’re lucky,” Adam said quietly. “Having Sophie. Having each other. He said he’s watched us at the company parties, and he thinks we’re the real thing.”

I leaned back against him. I didn’t know where this conversation was going. But I didn’t want it to end, either.

For months, Adam had been working weekends. Saturdays, mostly. Sometimes Sundays too. He said the company was short-staffed and he had to cover. He’d leave at eight in the morning and come home at seven at night, tired and quiet, and go straight to the shower.

And yet somehow, I felt lonelier when he was home than when he was gone.

He’d sit on the couch with his phone. He’d answer emails at dinner. When I talked, he’d say “mm-hmm” without looking up. When Sophie asked him to play a board game, he’d say “maybe later, bug,” and later never came.

So having his arms around me in the kitchen, on his birthday, with blue icing on the table and his chin on my shoulder, felt so good that I didn’t push him away.

I just stood there and let him hold me.

A week later, he brought Graham up again.

We were in the car, on the way back from Sophie’s swim lesson. She was in the back seat with her headphones on, watching a cartoon on my phone.

“Graham invited us to dinner,” Adam said. “This Saturday. His place. No pressure. Just a conversation.”

“I haven’t said I’d carry his baby, Adam.”

“I know. I know you haven’t. I’m not saying you have to. It’s just dinner.”

I watched the road for a minute.

“Why does it matter so much to you?”

He was quiet. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

“He’s considering me for regional director,” he said.

I frowned.

“What’s that got to do with this?”

Adam reached over and took my hand. He kept his other hand on the wheel.

“I’m not saying helping him guarantees anything,” he said. “Okay? I’m not saying that. I’d never say that. But Graham would know he could count on me. On us. On our family. That matters to him. Loyalty matters to him.”

I didn’t say anything.

But I thought about it.

We’d been fighting about money for months.

It had started back in the fall. The interest rate on our mortgage had adjusted, and our payment went up by almost four hundred dollars a month. Overnight. Just like that. I’d opened the letter at the kitchen counter and had to sit down.

Then, in November, Adam had come home with a new car…