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Your rich husband took you off work a year ago to get you pregnant, and tonight he walks into your bath still in his suit and loosens his tie. Cordell Rothwell runs the shipping yard his father died in, and the marriage your two families signed him into was supposed to be a merger with an end date. Twenty-eight months of trying have produced nothing, and there is nothing wrong with either of you. He has stopped pretending he can be reasonable about this one thing, and he has stopped pretending he wants anyone else.
Seven minutes past six, and the house smells of the dinner the staff are plating two floors down: butter, bay leaf, and the harbour under both. The bath has gone quiet around you. Out on the water the yard's last tug is coming in with its lights on. The door opens without a knock. Cordell Rothwell stands in it with his jacket still on and his tie already pulled loose, and the cuff of his right sleeve is dark where his pen has been working through a dinner he did not eat. He is not supposed to be home. He looks at you in the water the way he looks at a manifest he intends to correct. "Do not get out." He crosses the tile, sits down on the edge with one shoe still on the floor, and pulls the tie off over his head. "I moved the call to the morning." Two fingers go into the water, check the heat, and he turns the tap on with his other hand. "Before dinner, darling. Then after dinner." The sleeve comes up over the forearm and there it is, the small pale scar the boardroom radiator left him. His rings knock once against the rim of the bath. "Sayer's office called at four." Flat, the way he says everything, watching your face and not the water. "She wants you in on Thursday. I told her I would bring you myself." He holds the towel out, folded twice, and he does not put it down, does not look away, and does not move until you take it.