She looked.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you, and I just want to be with you. No matter what.” He was still holding the box, his face hopeful, his hand trembling, and she wanted nothing more than to open it, to slip the ring on her finger, to tell him yes and see him smile. But she couldn’t do it.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Okay,” he said, and looked at her, a little anxiously. “Just as long as it isn’t no.”
She looked away, and then she forced herself to say it. “What if I don’t want to have children?” When Diana had dreamed about her life, both before and after the rape, she’d considered many different versions of the future. Some of them involved traveling, or going back to school; some involved art, or writing, or teaching, but none of them had ever involved motherhood. She liked children—her nieces and her nephew, the kids she’d babysat when she was younger, Sam and Sarah Levy, from way back when—but she’d always been happy, at the end of a day or a night or a weekend, to give them back to their parents. Then the rape had piled another set of fears onto that initial reluctance. She was afraid of the appointments, of how it would feel to have her legs in stirrups and her body so exposed. If she had a girl, she’d be worried that something would happen to her daughter like what had happened to her, and she thought she wouldn’t have any idea about how to raise a boy.
She explained herself as best she could, a recitation that left Michael looking troubled. “Is it nonnegotiable?” he asked.
“I don’t think anything is nonnegotiable,” Diana replied. “But… well, is it very important to you?”
He bowed his head. “I need to think,” he said. She touched his shoulder, his dear face, the skin of his cheek so soft against his beard. “I love you very much,” she said, and prayed that it would be enough. He blew out the candle and drew her down to the bed.
“Let’s get some sleep,” he said. Diana closed her eyes, but for hours she lay awake with her heart quaking in her throat. She imagined she could feel her entire body trembling with the thought of losing him, and she didn’t know what she could say, or promise, to get him to stay.
The next morning, Michael went for a walk by himself, on the beach. Diana cleaned every inch of the cottage, emptying out the refrigerator and scrubbing the shelves, pulling every book and shell and postcard off the shelf to dust them. She tried not to look at the time, or to entertain fantasies that she’d never see Michael Carmody again.
A few hours later, Michael came back. His face was very serious as he took her by the hands. “I always thought that the reason you got married was to have a family,” he said. “I always thought I’d have kids, and be a good father to them, like my father was to me.”
She nodded and felt like she’d swallowed a stone, like she’d just stepped off a ledge and was falling into the darkness.
“But I want you to be my family,” he said. “I want us to be a family together. I want that more than anything.”
She gave a hiccup-y half-laugh, half-sob. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure about you. But you have to be sure about this.”
Diana squeezed her eyes shut and forced the words out of her mouth. “What if I don’t deserve to be happy?” she whispered.
His inhalation was loud enough for her to hear it; the noise that meant that he was angry and trying to keep his temper in check. Now is when he’ll realize I’m crazy, she thought. Now is when he’ll leave.
Michael paused, then said, in a slow and deliberate voice, “Do you think you deserved what happened to you that summer?”
Diana shook her head. When she thought about the girl she’d been, young and trusting, running, fleet-footed, down the beach in her white dress, it felt like she was thinking of a stranger. But she knew that girl hadn’t deserved what had happened to her. No girl did.
“Do you?” Michael’s voice was still low and calm, but she could hear anger underneath it.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Then why wouldn’t you deserve to be happy?” When she didn’t answer, he bent down to gently brush his lips against hers. “Everyone deserves to be happy,” he said. “Maybe you, most of all.” Diana wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close, hearing him breathe.
“I love you so much. Please say yes,” he whispered.
She watched him slide the ring on her finger. “Yes,” she said.