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“ A re you sure you’ll be all right by yourself, darling?”

Judith pauses the slicing she’s doing, her big chef’s knife lodged halfway into the carrot. They’re having beef stew tonight, Kenneth’s favorite.

“Of course,” she says, turning to face him. He’s in the doorway, arms crossed, grinning rakishly. “Are you sure you’ll be all right without me?”

Kenneth laughs, that deep throaty chuckle that disarmed her when they first met at their Survey of British Literature class at college, nearly six years ago. She thought him arrogant for weeks, the way he would dominate the class discussions, his opinions on Virginia Woolf and William Blake asinine and predictable. But his laugh was the reason she eventually relented to his pursuit and agreed to a date at the fondue place near the campus.

Now, she’s here, a ring on her finger and a baby in her belly.

“I’ll be miserable without you,” he says, sweeping into the kitchen to draw her up into an embrace. His jacket is cold and damp—he was trudging around outside in the snow, the way he does when he needs to think. Which has been more and more these past few months, with the looming groundbreaking on his first real assignment at the architectural firm, a sprawling office park in Pennsylvania.

He was probably down in the fallout shelter, too.

“Nervous?” Judith teases, tousling his hair, still sprinkled with flakes of snow.

“A little.” Kenneth drops his hand down to her belly, only just starting to show. “Not about the groundbreaking, though. More about you. And the little one.”

“We’ll be fine.” Judith swats him away and returns to dismantling the carrot into little orange discs. “You’ll only be gone a week.”

“A lot can happen in a week.” Kenneth leans forward and snatches one of the carrot pieces to pop in his mouth.

“And nothing can happen in a week,” Judith counters. “Really, darling, you focus on the groundbreaking. I’ve got Dr. Martin’s number right by the phone. You know he’s willing to do house calls.”

Kenneth sighs but doesn’t protest further. His protectiveness can be irritating, especially for a Texas girl like her, growing up unsupervised in the dense, treacherous tangle of the Big Thicket, but she knows he likes to dote, so she lets him.

“Go watch TV,” she says. “Let me finish in here.” She kisses his cheek. “I want my husband to have his favorite meal before he flies off to Pennsylvania.”

Kenneth gives her one of those dazzling smiles of his. It’s meant to soothe, to charm, to tell her everything is just fine. But she’s known him half a decade at this point, and she sees how it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“And afterward,” Judith says, dropping her voice to a low husky purr, her lips brushing against his ear. “I’ll give you something else to remember me by.”

“Careful, Mrs. Vale.” Kenneth saunters backward, never taking his eyes off her. “You’re going to be a mother soon.”

The familiar sting of his rejection stabs through her chest. It was two years of marriage before she finally got pregnant, and not from lack of trying on her part. “I’m not one yet.”

Kenneth grins that. “And I can’t wait, darling.”

He ducks out of the kitchen, and for a moment, Judith just stares at the empty doorway, her hand on her belly. Then she turns back to the pile of carrots and potatoes and onions. Nearly done. The meat is next, a big glistening hunk of cow flesh she’ll slice into bits small enough to fit on a spoon.

All this so Kenneth will keep his wandering eye in check when he’s in Pennsylvania, surrounded by the senior architects and their young and unmarried secretaries. Judith knows he looks—all men look—but she has heard from the other company wives that he doesn’t touch. Still, she worries. He’s the perfect husband in so many ways, doting and loving, buying this sprawling architectural wonder in the middle of the forest so they could have the space to raise a family. He tells her he loves her every day and showers her with chaste kisses.

What he doesn’t do is fuck her. And that’s why she worries about the secretaries.

You’re his wife, not his mistress, Judith’s mother told her shortly after their luxurious but disappointing honeymoon in Hawaii. They married only a year after meeting, in large part because Kenneth insisted on doing things traditionally, even with the sexual revolution blossoming around them on campus. Only kisses until the wedding night. And then, even with two weeks in the tropics, their wedding night was the only night they made love.

Don’t let him forget what he has waiting at home . That was the other thing Judith’s mother told her, Judith in tears, the phone cradled against her cheek. A good wife. That way, he’ll always come back to you .

Judith keeps cutting.