Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online

windows, a perfect May morning, the whole city in bloom, from the daffodils in the planters in the median on Fifth Avenue to the trees in Central Park. “Shit,” I said, and shut my eyes. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
    “Oh, babe,” said Marcus. He leaned forward to kiss my cheek, letting me feel the warmth of his skin and smell the cedar and vetiver in his cologne. He was crying a little. Perversely, that made me feel better, like I hadn’t forced him to do this. Marcus was in his late fifties, with three grown children, all of them out of the house and reasonably self-sufficient. He would have been well within his rights to tell me he was done with babies. But he hadn’t. Marcus loved me. He wanted me to have everything I wanted. “We can try again next month, if Dreiser says it’s all right.”
    Dreiser was Dr. Theodore Dreiser of Harvard and Columbia, acknowledged by New York magazine and everyone else whomattered as the top reproductive specialist in the city. I shook my head.
    “No more.”
    “Listen. You don’t have to make up your mind right now. We’ll get some lunch, you can have a glass of wine.”
    I smiled. These days, the only times I drank were after doctors’ visits such as these . . . or after the D and C that would follow. Then I pulled the cotton gown down over my bare knees (tanned, hairless, absolutely jiggle-free, looking better than they had when I was a teenager) and sat up. “I’m not getting any younger.” This was true. I might have had the body of a woman in her twenties—I certainly worked hard enough at it—but I was forty-three years old, even if Marcus thought I was thirty-eight. “I don’t think we’ve got any more time to waste.”
    Marcus, impeccable in his made-to-measure shirt and silk tie, started to answer when the door opened, revealing the doctor, slim and erect in his white coat, with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, oversized Roman features, liquid brown eyes, and an expression of consternation. He didn’t like being a loser any more than I did. It meant that New York magazine and the ladies who mattered, the ones who could pay for treatments even after their insurance ran out, might start sending their friends somewhere else. “Guys, I’m so sorry,” he said. Marcus squeezed my hand again. I turned my face toward the wall and finally let the tears come, the ones that had been threatening since the spotting—bleeding—had started.
    I was thirty-seven when I met my husband—thirty-seven as far as he was concerned; forty-two in real life, but if I looked thirty-seven and had ID to prove it, then why tell people I wasn’t? Honesty has its place, and its place is not in the dating world. For the past five years, I’d run my own public-relations shop, a boutique agency with a handful of clients, a mix of reliable-but-boring businesses—a jewelry designer, a chain of magazines—who’d pay their bills on time and rarely need my help in the middle of the night, plus a handful of celebrities who were neither reliable nor boring, who’d pay a minimum of five thousand dollars a month to keep me on retainer and sometimes would require my services in the wee small hours.
    Every day I went to the office dressed in one of the designer suits I’d bought secondhand at Michael’s Consignment on the Upper East Side. I’d wear Manolos and Louboutins—I had two pairs of each, and rotated them every day. My jeweler client lent me necklaces and bracelets and cocktail rings; the makeup line I represented sent over a basket of freebies every month. I bartered with a dentist to get my teeth bleached and traded with a personal trainer and a dermatologist for their services, but I still paid to get my hair highlighted at Frédéric Fekkai, which was insanely costly but a necessary expense, the kind of thing you couldn’t scrimp on. Everyone saw your hair every day and everyone worth knowing would know whether you were paying for those buttery chunks or trying