You are losing your child. His child. You're losing. You're lying on your left side in bed, hands on your ankles, chin on your knees, a sticky cotton pad bunched between your thighs. With one eye closed you can still see the window, a gray rectangle slashed with rain. You shiver, and open both eyes. There's no point in pretending this is just a dream.

Toby paces on the other side of the bedroom, his reflection ghosting in the window glass. Even though he's barefoot, you can hear each of his steps on the carpet. Finally he sits down on the bed, not touching you, though his weight spreads across the mattress and laps at the curve of your back like a tide against stone.

He clears his throat. "I should call them in New Hampshire," he says.

Until he says this you hadn't imagined that he could possibly leave you here. You make an effort and roll onto your back, pointing your knees at the ceiling. A loose strand of hair falls and tickles your nose. "Are you sure you don't want to go up there?"

"Are you kidding me?"

"Just checking," you say. You puff out your lower lip to blow the hair out of your face. "The transition team might need you."

He looks at you over his shoulder. "If you want to be alone, I can--"

"I don't *want* any of this."

"I know that," he says, but his eyes stay on you, the needling gaze that always made you crazy for him and has, lately, been making you crazy. The shadows beneath his eyes are bone-deep. You watch him turning a Sharpie marker around in his fingers. He's been worrying that the President he elected won't give him a job, and he's been worrying about you, but the segue is something you can't see, and don't quite trust.

A pain runs around your abdomen, like a ribbon pulled tight. You inhale, bunching the cotton of your pajama pants in your fists, until the ribbon lets go again and you can release the breath.

Toby turns halfway around and strokes a line of goosebumps on your bare arm; he doesn't say anything. In his silence, you listen to the rain spattering against the window glass. It's been a wet November.

You use the back of your hand to wipe a film of sweat from your forehead, and say, "I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. I really thought this time. When we got past the ninth week--it's stupid, after all, and both of us have been tiptoeing around like we'd jinx it. All the same, I really thought."

His face reddens a little, along the edge of his beard. He rolls his knuckles against the inside of your elbow. "Eleven weeks is a long time," he says.

The doctors have told you so much; you know too much about the hormone levels fluctuating in your body, moving around your brain like clouds, and you don't trust yourself to speak. You take your arm away from Toby and move your fingers over the smooth, hot skin below your navel. You have been married to this man for seven years. Seven years is a long time. It doesn't make sense that eleven weeks should seem so much longer.

One single sob rises in your throat, like a bubble, and bursts from your lips. Toby shifts closer, onto the bed, lining his body up with yours. He leans back against the headboard and the wall, and gives you that look.

"Maybe we should wait a while before we try again," he mumbles, as if he's trying to lose the words.

You turn your face toward the window. The rain is freezing, breaking into crystals on the window glass. Your eyes hurt like you're crying, but you're not crying. You're bleeding.

What you are losing is not undifferentiated cells or unlimited potential. You are losing a precise marriage of biology and possibility. A specific child. You'll try again--you'll have a baby or die trying; you know this, you have whispered it to Toby and to God in the dark--but you'll never conceive this child again, this little boy or girl that would have nibbled at your breast, wrapped chubby arms around Toby's leg, this child that would have mended and rended your hearts. You hardly spoke about the pregnancy, but you thought about it every second, while you talked about his campaign and your election, which you celebrated with grape juice instead of champagne. Knowing, every second, that you were not alone.

Eleven weeks. A lifetime.

You lower your chin to your chest, hiding in the red drape of your hair. You listen to Toby breathe like he doesn't know any of this. Like it's not happening to him, it's happening next to him. He doesn't know any of this.

"Andi." He says your name like there's a sword suspended above his head. The ribbon pulls tight.

"Did you fuck around during the campaign?"

"...What?"

The pitch of his voice rises. He's honestly shocked. Good. You shake your head slowly, drawing your legs up even tighter against your chest. "People always do," you say. You lick your dry lips and add, "I wouldn't blame you."

He laughs a dry, stiff laugh, pushes himself up from the bed and walks out of the room. After a minute or so, you begin to imagine that he's never coming back. You're about to get up when he reappears in the doorway, his right hand choking a bottle of beer.

"'I wouldn't blame you.'" His mouth twists. "That's, that's some unbelievable bullshit right there."

Maybe it is. You lace your fingers together against your calves and find yourself making a speech you hadn't meant to memorize. "We've both spent this year on the road. We've barely been in the same time zone and we can only have sex when I'm ovulating. Meanwhile you're working three feet from C.J. for twenty hours a day."

"Oh, God." He pours about half of the beer down his throat.

"She can tolerate you, God knows, there's no reason for you not to go to bed with her." It feels good to say this, like kicking off your shoes. You raise your chin and smile your best, glossiest smile at him, your government-issue shit-eating grin. "And if she wouldn't, I'm sure you could find someone cheaper."

Toby coughs, drags his hand across the creases in his forehead. He looks at the rain, at the carpet. His shoes. Your face. "I didn't fuck around," he says, with no affect in his voice. When he sounds that flat, you know he is angry enough to hit someone. His knuckles are white on the bottle. "I didn't. I don't. And you--you know that. So what the hell do you want?"

So what do you want?

You want to get at Toby, to blame him. You want to know how much he *wants* to fuck C.J. or his secretary or some intern you've never met. Any other woman. A woman who's free, unconcerned with cycles and chemistry, a life like the one you lived when you thought getting pregnant was as easy as falling down on your back. You want to make this his failure as a man, not yours as a mother. You want to keep your goddamned baby. You can't ask for that. Any of that.

The words you don't say knot your vocal cords. You sprawl back against the pillows, legs splayed, hands pressed over your eyes. Nothing comes.

Nothing comes, and then the pain is too much and tears crash the dam of your fingers, and you're hearing yourself say, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it, I'm sorry." The mattress sags as Toby climbs down to you, pushing a pillow aside. "Really. I am."

"Yeah." His voice is very tired. He circles your wrist in one hand, pulls it away from your face, and kisses the damp hollow in the center of your palm. Then he hands you the bottle of beer.

Your nose and eyes are still running as you take a swig. The beer doesn't taste like anything at all, but you drink it anyway, and wipe your face with a corner of the sheet. "Oh, Toby," you say, and pass the bottle back. You remember drinking like this with him when you were both much younger, huddled in a single-occupancy motel room, forgetting where you were, but never why you were there. Now he's waiting to hear about a job in the White House.

You're bleeding. He holds your hand. His fingers are warm, or yours are cold.

After a while, the room's gotten dark and you've stopped sniffling. "Most people think we're the happiest couple out there," you say, turning to Toby with a more honest smile. One that hurts to give. "Isn't that terrible?"

He turns your hand over in his and writes something with his fingertip along your forearm. This time he doesn't look you in the eye. "It's probably true."

You close your eyes and you're both quiet. You can hear the winter, just outside, held off by a transparent sheet of glass.