“Talk about chauvinistic, Ol. What do you expect me to do, sit here all day and talk to myself while he screams?” There were days when she really thought she couldn't take it. And the prospect of having the four children he still wanted made her suicidal.

Her own parents were no help because they were in Chicago, and for all their good intentions, his weren't much better. His mother had had one child, and the memory of how to cope with it seemed to have escaped her. Being around Benjamin only seemed to make her nervous. But not nearly as nervous as it was making Sarah.

Eventually the baby settled down, and Benjamin seemed a lot less terrifying to her by the time he was walking. They were finally out of the woods They rented a house on Long Island for the summer, and in another year she could send him to nursery school … one more year … she was almost home free … and then she could go back to writing. She had given up the idea of a job. She wanted to write a novel. Everything was starting to look up, and then she got the flu. It was the flu to end all flus, and after a month of it, she was convinced she was dying. She had never been so sick in her life. She had a cold that simply would not go away, a cough that sounded like TB, and she was nauseated from morning till night from coughing. In the end, after four weeks of battling it, she decided to go to the expense and see the doctor. She had the flu, but she had more than that. She was expecting another baby. This time there was no anger, no rages, no outrage or fury, there was simply despair, and what seemed to Oliver like hours and hours and hours of crying. She couldn't face it, she couldn't do it again. She couldn't handle another child, and Benjamin wasn't even out of diapers, and now there would be two of them. It was the only time she had actually seen Oliver down too. He didn't know what to do to turn her around. And just like the first time, he was thrilled about the baby, but telling her that only made her cry harder.

“I can't … I just can't, Ollie … please … don't make me. …” They argued about an abortion again, and once she almost swayed him, for fear that if he didn't agree, she might go crazy. But he talked her out of it, and he got a raise when she was halfway through the pregnancy, and spent every penny of it hiring a woman to come in and help her with Benjamin three afternoons a week. She was an Irish girl from a family of thirteen children, and she was just what Sarah needed. Suddenly she could go out, to libraries, to meet friends, to art galleries and museums, and her disposition improved immeasurably. She even started to enjoy Benjamin, and once or twice she took him to the museum with her. And Oliver knew that although she wouldn't admit it to him, she was beginning to look forward to their second baby.

Melissa was born when Benjamin was two, and Oliver started thinking seriously about moving his family to the country. They looked at houses in Connecticut almost every weekend, and finally decided they just couldn't afford them. They tried Long Island, West-chester, and it seemed as though every weekend they were riding to look at houses. Pound Ridge, Rye, Bronxville, Katonah, and then finally, after a year, they found just what they wanted in Purchase. It was an old farmhouse that hadn't been lived in in twenty years, and it needed an enormous amount of work. It was part of an estate, and they got it for a song in probate. A song that still cost them dearly to sing, but scraping and saving and doing most of the work themselves, they turned it into a remarkably pretty place within a year, and they were both proud of it. “But this does not mean I'm going to have more children, Oliver Watson!” As far as she was concerned, it was enough of a sacrifice that she was living in the suburbs. She had sworn that she would never do that when they were dating. But even she had to admit that it made more sense. The apartment on Second Avenue had been impossible to manage, and everything else they'd looked at in town seemed tiny and was ridiculously expensive. Here the children had their own rooms.

There was a huge but cozy living room with a fireplace, a library they lovingly filled with books, a cozy kitchen with two brick walls, heavy wooden beams overhead, and an old-fashioned stove that Sarah insisted on restoring and keeping. It had huge bay windows that looked over what she magically turned into a garden, and she could watch the children playing outside when she was cooking. With their move to the country, she had lost the Irish girl, and it was just as well, because for the moment they couldn't afford her.

Benjamin was three by then anyway, and he was in school every morning, and two years later Melissa was in school too, and Sarah told herself she would go back to writing. But somehow there was no time anymore.

She always had things to do. She was doing volunteer work at the local hospital, working one day a week at the children's school, running errands, doing car pools, keeping the house clean, ironing Ollie's shirts, and working in the garden. It was a hell of a switch for the once assistant editor of the Crimson. But the funny thing was, she didn't mind it.

Once they left New York, it was as though a part of her got left behind there, the part of her that had still been fighting marriage and motherhood. Suddenly, she seemed a part of the peaceful little world around her. She met other women with children the same age, there were couples they played tennis and bridge with on the weekends, her volunteer work seemed to be constantly more demanding, and the thrashing and fighting she had done was all but forgotten. And along with all of that went her writing. She didn't even miss it anymore. All she wanted was what she had, a happy, busy little life with her husband and children.

Benjamin's screaming babyhood began to fade into distant memory and he turned into a sweet sunny child, who not only had her looks but seemed to share all her interests and passions and values. He was like a little sponge, soaking up everything she was, and in many ways, he was like a mirror of Sarah. Oliver saw it and laughed, and although Sarah seldom admitted it to anyone, in some ways it flattered and amused her. He was so much like her. Melissa was a sweet child too, she was easier than Benjamin had been, and in some ways she was more like her father. She had an easy smile, and a happy attitude about life. And she didn't seem to want much from either of them. She was happy following Sarah everywhere with a book or a doll or a puzzle. Sometimes, Sarah even forgot she was in the next room. She was an undemanding little girl, and she had Oliver's blond hair and green eyes, yet she didn't really look like him. She looked more like his mother actually, which when commented on by her in-laws never failed to annoy Sarah.

She and Oliver's mother had never really become friends. Mrs. Watson had been outspoken early on and had told her only son what she thought of Sarah before they were married. She thought her a headstrong, difficult girl, who wanted her own way at any price, and she always feared that one day she might hurt Oliver badly. But so far Sarah had been a good wife to him, she admitted to her husband begrudgingly when he stood up for the girl, but Sarah always felt that the older woman was watching her, as though waiting for some slip, some faux pas, some terrible failing that would prove her right in the end. The only joy the two women shared was the two children, who delighted Mrs. Watson, and whom Sarah loved now as though she had wanted them from the first, which Mrs. Watson still remembered she hadn't. Oliver had never told her anything, but she had sensed what was going on, without being told. She was an intelligent woman with a quick eye, and she knew perfectly well that Sarah hadn't been happy to be pregnant, nor had she enjoyed Benjamin's early days, but on the other hand, she had to admit that he hadn't been an easy baby. He had unnerved her, too, with his constant colicky screaming. But all of that was forgotten now, as the children grew, and Sarah and Oliver thrived, both of them busy and happy, and doing well. And Sarah finally seemed to have given up her literary aspirations, which had always seemed a little excessive to Mrs. Watson.

“She's a good girl, Phyllis. Don't be so hard on her. She was young when they got married. And she makes Oliver very happy.” Her husband had always been more philosophical than she was.

“I know … but I always get the feeling that she wants something more, something just out of reach … something that will cost Oliver dearly.” It was an astute remark, more so than she knew. But George Watson shook his head with an indulgent smile.

“Ollie can handle her.”

“I'm not sure he wants to. I think he'd let her have anything she wants, whatever the cost to him. He's that kind of man.” She smiled gently up at the husband she had loved for almost forty years, years that were too precious to even count now. They had become bonded like one body, one soul, long since. She couldn't even remember a time without him. “He's just like his father. Too good. Sometimes that can be dangerous in the hands of the wrong woman.” She was always concerned about her son, and even after all these years, always faintly distrustful of Sarah.

But the compliment had not gone unnoticed by her husband, as he smiled down at his bride with the look that still made her tingle. “Give the girl a little credit, Phyllis. She hasn't hurt our boy, and she's given him, and us, two beautiful children.” Indeed they were, and although neither of them looked exactly like their father, they both had some of his classic good looks. Oliver was tall and graceful and athletic-looking, with thick, straight blond hair that had been the envy of every mother when he was a child, and every girl when he was in college. And although Sarah seldom acknowledged it to him, because she didn't want to bloat his ego beyond something she could cope with, more than once she had heard it said that Oliver Watson was the best-looking man in Purchase. For six months of the year, he had a deep tan, and his green eyes seemed to dance with mischief and laughter. And yet he was unaware of his good looks, which made him all the more attractive.

“Do you think they'll have more children, George?” Phyllis often wondered but would never have dared to ask her son, much less Sarah.

“I don't know, darling. I think they have a full life as it is. And these days, you can never be too sure of what's going to happen. Oliver is in an insecure business. Advertising is nothing like banking when I was a young man. You can't count on anything anymore. It's probably wiser for them not to.” George Watson had been talking that way for the past year. He had lived long enough to watch many of his investments, once so sound, begin to shrink and dwindle. The cost of living was astonishingly high, and he and Phyllis had to be careful. They had a pretty little house in Westchester they had bought fifteen years before, around the time when Oliver was in college. They knew that he'd never be coming home again for any great length of time, and it seemed foolish to continue hanging on to their rambling old house in New London. But George worried about their finances constantly now. It wasn't that they were destitute by any means, but if they both lived another twenty-five years, which at fifty-nine and sixty-two they still could, and he hoped they did, it could stretch their savings beyond their limit. He had just retired from the bank and was getting a decent pension. And he had made numerous wise investments over the years, but still … you could never be too careful. It was what he told Oliver every time he saw him. He had seen a lot in his lifetime, one big war and several small ones. He had fought in Guadalcanal, and been lucky enough to survive it. He had been twelve in the crash of '29, he knew just how brutal the Depression had been, and he had seen the economy go up and down over the years. He wanted his son to be careful. “I don't see why they'd want any more children.”

And Sarah completely agreed with him. It was one of the few subjects on which she and George Watson were in total agreement. Whenever the subject came up with Oliver, once in a while in bed late at night, or on a quiet walk in the woods in a remote corner of Purchase, she always told him she thought it was silly to even consider it. “Why would we want more kids now, Ollie? Melissa and Benjamin are growing up. They're easy, they have their own lives. In a few years we'll be able to do anything we want. Why tie ourselves down with all those headaches again?” Even the thought of it made her shudder.

“It wouldn't be the same this time. We could afford someone to help us. I don't know … I just think it would be nice. One day we might regret not having more children.” He looked at her tenderly with the eyes that almost made women swoon at the PTA, but Sarah pretended not to notice.