“Did I hurt you?” she asked.
His eyes suddenly turned into ice chips. “No. You do not have the power to do such a thing.”
“Oh. It’s only that... You have been very angry at me.”
“Yes. I have been.”
“But?”
“You do not possess the ability to hurt me, Olive.”
And she could hear beneath that, a firm no one does.
“And so now you won’t take my word. You won’t take my word that the baby is yours.”
“Just play the game, Olive.”
“Or is waiting for the test results just a bit to punish me.”
“I do not need to punish you.”
“All right then, is marriage not meant to be a punishment?”
“It is meant to be a solution.”
“All right. So tell me, will we ever be friends again?”
“We were never truly friends to begin with.”
“So you’ll tell me that I’m singular, unique. That we are like nothing, but you cannot tell me that we are friends?”
He shrugged. “I don’t have friends.”
She gestured to the board game. “This is a very odd way of expressing it.”
“I have colleagues, I have lovers.”
“And you intend to take me as a wife. I already know what the results will be. So I already know what you will demand. And so I want to know. What does it mean? Will you love the baby? Will you ever love me?”
She felt small and afraid asking that question, and she did not wish to know why it affected her so.
His expression went flat. “There is no love left in me.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“Sometimes the point, Olive, is to simply do the right thing.”
“What if the right thing becomes the wrong thing if there’s no feeling behind it?”
“It does not matter if the end result is the same.”
“I think it does,” she said.
“Then you are free to feel as you see fit.”
“I won,” she said. “And I didn’t cheat.” She looked at the board game and counted up her resources.
He frowned. “So you did. You’re a worthy opponent.”