2 - A MISTAKE AT THE CLINIC
The clatter of breakfast dishes filled the kitchen, a domestic soundtrack that felt obscene after the silence of the night before.
Victoria stood at the sink, her hands moving through the motions—plate, rinse, dishwasher, repeat—while the morning sun cut hard angles through the window above the faucet.
She hadn't slept. Not really. The ceiling fan had turned its hundred revolutions while her brain replayed the sensation of Brock's body, the sound he'd made when he came inside her, the way his gray eyes had followed her up the stairs like a man watching his own execution.
Joey was at the kitchen table, hunched over a cup of coffee he wasn't drinking.
His brown hair was disheveled, his glasses slightly askew.
The hangover was written across his face in the pallor of his skin, the way he squinted against the light.
Or maybe that wasn't the hangover. Maybe that was just what defeat looked like.
"You want toast?" Victoria asked.
"No."
"Eggs?"
"I'm not hungry."
She scraped a plate harder than necessary, the tines of the fork screeching against ceramic. Joey flinched but didn't comment.
"I should've stayed up with you last night," he said.
Victoria's hand stilled on the sponge. "You were tired."
"I was drunk." The word landed hard, self-accusatory. "I passed out like—like it didn't matter. Like you weren't—" He stopped. Pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize."
"I keep doing that, don't I? Apologizing for things that apologies can't fix." He looked up at her then, his brown eyes bloodshot and wet. "I'm supposed to be your husband. I'm supposed to be there for you. And instead, I got hammered and left you alone."
Victoria turned back to the dishes. The lie sat ready on her tongue—you didn't leave me alone, Brock was there—but she swallowed it. "You were grieving too, Joey. It's not just my loss."
"But it's my fault." His voice cracked. "All of this. The money. The move. The—my body. My useless—"
"Stop." She turned off the faucet. The kitchen fell quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. "I don't blame you."
"You should."
"Maybe. But I don't."
It wasn't entirely a lie. The resentment was there, coiled in her chest like it had been for months, but standing at the sink with Brock's dried seed still a phantom sensation inside her, she couldn't summon the anger she'd felt yesterday.
Guilt had displaced it. Guilt and something else—a nervous, tremulous hope that she couldn't look at directly, the way you couldn't look at the sun.
Joey's phone buzzed on the table. He glanced at the screen. "I have to go. The Henderson audit's due today."
"Then go."
"Victoria—"
"I'm fine." She dried her hands on a dish towel and crossed to him, bending to press a kiss to his temple. His skin tasted faintly of salt. "Go to work. We'll talk later."
He caught her wrist before she could pull away. "I love you. You know that, right? No matter what happens, I love you."
"I know."
And she did. That was the terrible thing.
Joey loved her with a desperate, guilty devotion that made what she'd done last night unforgivable.
She watched him gather his laptop bag and his keys, watched him pause at the door like he wanted to say something else, watched him leave with the weight of his failure still bowed across his shoulders.
The front door closed. She heard his car start in the driveway, the crunch of tires on gravel.
Then silence.
—
The bathroom mirror showed a woman who looked like Victoria but felt like a stranger.
Same blonde hair pinned up. Same blue eyes.
Same slender figure beneath the oversized t-shirt she'd worn to bed.
But her cheeks were flushed, and her lips were still slightly swollen from Brock's stubble, and there was a tenderness between her legs that reminded her with every step.
She brushed her teeth. Splashed water on her face. Stared at her reflection and tried to find the version of herself who would have been horrified by what she'd done.
That woman wasn't there anymore.
Downstairs, the kitchen was still a mess. Joey's half-empty coffee cup sat beside a plate of untouched toast. Victoria cleared them both, scraping the cold bread into the trash, and was running the sponge over the counter when she heard the floorboards creak behind her.
Brock.
She didn't need to turn around to know it was him.
The awareness of his presence was a physical thing, a prickle at the back of her neck that had been building for weeks.
She'd attributed it to the hormones, to the proximity, to anything except what it actually was—a frequency her body had learned to recognize.
"Morning," she said, her voice steadier than she felt.
"Joey gone?"
"Just left."
She turned. He was dressed for work—dark uniform, duty belt in his hand, jaw freshly shaven. His gray eyes were shadowed, the lines at their corners deeper than they'd been yesterday. He looked like a man who hadn't slept either.
"Victoria, we need to talk."
The sponge dripped in her hand. She set it down. "Okay."
"I've been up all night thinking." He didn't come closer, just stood in the doorway with his duty belt hanging from his grip. The kitchen island stood between them like a demilitarized zone. "What happened last night—"
"I know."
"—was a mistake."
She'd expected the words. Had braced for them. But hearing them still landed somewhere soft and unprotected in her chest. "A mistake," she repeated.
"It shouldn't have happened." Brock's voice was rough, scraped raw. "You're my son's wife. I'm supposed to take care of you, not—" He stopped. Swallowed hard. "Not take advantage of you when you're hurting."
"You didn't take advantage."
"Didn't I?" His eyes met hers. "You'd just found out the IVF failed. You were grieving. I should've—I should've stopped it."
Something in Victoria bristled. "I'm not a child, Brock. I knew what I was doing."
"Did you? Because I sure as hell didn't." He set his duty belt on the counter, the metal buckle clanking against the granite. "I've spent thirty years in a job where one wrong move gets people killed. I'm supposed to have control. And last night, I—" He exhaled. "I had none."
The confession hung between them. Victoria watched the muscle in his jaw pulse, watched his hands grip the edge of the counter like he needed to hold himself in place.
"I'm not going to tell Joey," she said quietly. "If that's what you're worried about."
"I'm worried about a lot of things."
"He won't find out."
Brock's laugh was humorless. "You sure about that? You think we just go back to playing happy family and pretend I didn't—" He couldn't finish the sentence. "Joey's not stupid, Victoria. He's going to notice something's different."
"Nothing's different." The lie came easily. Easier than she wanted it to. "We had a moment of weakness. We're both adults. We can move past it."
"A moment of weakness." He tasted the words. Shook his head. "That's one way to put it."
"What do you want me to say? That I regret it? Because I don't." His eyes snapped to hers, and she pressed on before she could lose her nerve. "I don't regret it, Brock. I know that makes me a terrible person. I know that if Joey ever found out, it would destroy him. But I can't regret it. I won't."
"Victoria—"
"You asked if I knew what I was doing. I did. I knew exactly what I was doing when I kissed you. And I'd do it again."
The air in the kitchen thickened. Brock stared at her, and she could see the war in him—the correctional officer who'd spent decades enforcing rules, the lonely widower who'd spent the last year eating dinner alone, the father who loved his son beyond anything.
But also the man who'd gripped her hips hard enough to bruise. The man who'd groaned her name into her mouth. The man who'd spilled himself inside her and held her while she came apart.
"It can't happen again," he said. But his voice cracked on the last word.
"I know."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." She picked up the sponge again, needing something to do with her hands. "We'll pretend it never happened. You're right. It's the only thing we can do."
Brock was silent for a long moment. Then he picked up his duty belt and buckled it around his waist. The motions were automatic, muscle memory from decades of routine. "I'm working a double today. Won't be home until late."
"Okay."
"Victoria." He stopped at the door, his back to her. "For what it's worth—I don't regret it either."
He left before she could respond. The screen door slapped shut behind him, and she stood alone in the kitchen, the sponge dripping water onto the floor.
—
The next three weeks blurred into a rhythm of avoidance.
Victoria woke early. Made coffee for Joey, who drank it in silence before heading to the accounting firm where he'd buried himself in work since the failed transfer.
She folded laundry. She cooked dinners that none of them seemed to taste.
She gave herself the hormone injections even though she knew there was no embryo to support—the doctor had told her to finish the cycle, to let her body reset, to wait for her period to come.
It didn't come.
On day thirty-one of her cycle, she told herself it was the hormones. The injections could delay menstruation. It was normal. Expected, even.
On day thirty-five, she started counting backward.
The night on the couch. Where she'd been in her cycle.
The fertility tracking she'd done obsessively for years, charting temperatures and cervical mucus and the precise moment of ovulation.
She'd been in her fertile window. She'd known it at the time—had felt the familiar ache in her lower belly, the slickness between her thighs that her body produced when it was ready.
And she'd still told Brock to cum inside her.
Don't regret it, she'd said.
On day thirty-eight, she woke up nauseous.