“You can’t just suddenly burst in now,” Sylvia said. She felt a headache rising, starting at her collarbone and moving up in a wave against gravity, as her headaches always did. She rubbed her jaw and looked into her teacup, where there were still a few drops of milky white syrup from the sugar.
“I don’t want that. I just want to see him. I want to tell him I care. I want to say I’m sorry.” She looked at Sylvia. “About the cancer. About the cancer. God, Syl.”
“He doesn’t want....” she wanted to say a scene but knew that it would annoy Marg. “He doesn’t want a lot of....” She tried again. “He doesn’t want sympathy. He doesn’t want you to feel sorry for him.”
“I just want to see him,” Marg repeated. “I’ll bake something. It’ll be fine. It doesn’t have to be now. I’m teaching all day tomorrow. But maybe Thursday? Friday?”
Sylvia started to say something but before she could speak Marg added, “I won’t feel sorry for him.”
The tentative equilibrium had shattered when Sylvia announced her pregnancy. Marg had frowned and then tried to smile, a strange, twisted smile that still contained the frown. She said congratulations. She did all the right things. It was not until the last month of the pregnancy that Sylvia learned that Marg had started sleeping with Hugh again. Hugh told her. Downcast, apologetic. It would not happen again, he promised. It was something unfinished between them that had to be finished. He’d been vulnerable. It was finished now. Sylvia, her belly like a beach ball in front of her, had bicycled straight to Marg’s. Marg was in her study, bent over her books.
“When were you going to tell me?” Sylvia asked, her voice high and foreign to her, her belly pulsing.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” Marg said calmly, turning in her chair. “It was Hugh who wanted to. I asked him not to.”