Tess asked the easier one first

Tess asked, straight out, over eggs: would you have kids with him if the money was fine. I said that is not the question. And she said, I know it is not, I am asking you the easier one first. Which is a technique. It is my technique, actually. You do not ask the load-bearing question, you ask the one next to it, because the answer to the easy one tells you where the hard one lives and the person does not feel cornered. I have used it four hundred times. Being on the receiving end of it from a school counsellor over breakfast was genuinely unpleasant in a way I am still thinking about. I did not answer it. I did the thing where you acknowledge the question warmly and then move, and I moved us onto her sister and the apartment thing, and Tess let me, which she did not have to do. The part I have not been able to shake all evening is that I know what the answer to the easy one is. The answer to the easy one is yes. Obviously yes. If the money was fine I would be pregnant or trying by Christmas and both of us know it. So the money is not the question either.

I have been sitting here for about four minutes not typing anything, which is probably its own answer. I think it is something about whether I would find out. Not about money, exactly. About whether I would be told. I do not want to write any more about this tonight.