Adam gave up on the demo and shut down his laptop for the night. He was still shaken after the ugly scene with the nanny. He felt sick to his stomach from the words he had just uttered to her. “Adele’s mother is dead.” How could he even allow those words to pass his lips?

For the second night in a row, he found himself heading for the locked cabinet where he kept all of Jane’s old memorabilia. He opened one of the scrapbooks this time, leafing through the bits and pieces of junk she had assembled with all those carefully typed labels. His tickets to the 2013 Grammy’s. Her first backstage pass for the Voice. One of their wedding announcements. And the song lyrics from his fourth album, of course. She’d insisted that he turn over all those little bits of scrap paper where he’d jotted down the disjointed lines that eventually came together to make the album. She’d arranged them chronologically, a historical account of the songwriting process that went into making a complete record. His eyes skimmed over them quickly. He was looking for one in particular, and he flipped to the end of the scrapbook – to that last chorus he’d written after struggling with one particular song for months. There it was on the back of a wrinkled cocktail napkin, even more illegible than his usual scrawl. He was surprised he could make the words out at all, honestly. He’d been blind drunk when he wrote it.

I was the man who never lied.

Never lied until today,

But I just couldn’t break your heart

Like you did mine yesterday.

The man who never lied, he thought to himself with a smirk. He should put a match to it and burn it after the whopper he’d just told tonight. Of course, that line hadn’t been true when he wrote the song either. He struggled to suppress the memory of the events that had led him to write it, but he couldn’t quite manage it – not when the conversation with the nanny was still reverberating inside his head. “She was wanted,” he’d said just now. “Adele, I mean. She was very wanted.”

***

January 2013

 “Premature ovarian failure,” Jane read from the pamphlet she held in her hand.

Adam snuck a glance at her in the passenger seat of the convertible Porsche he was driving, but her eyes were down. “OK,” he replied, careful to keep his voice neutral. “Now say it in English please.”

“In English?” she responded without looking up. “It means I’m too fucking old to have kids, Adam.”

Her voice sounded perfectly calm, but he knew her better than that. Jane didn’t throw around the f-bombs unless something was up. “Come on. That can’t be true. You’re 33!”

She merely shrugged and looked away from him, out the passenger side window.

“Whatever,” he said to the back of her head. “Wasn’t J Lo like 50 when she had kids?”

She didn’t respond, just kept staring out the window. He came to a stop at a stoplight, and she popped the car door open and scooted out onto the sidewalk.

“What the hell!” he shouted after her, but she was already walking down the sidewalk away from the car.

“Goddammit Jane!” he swore under his breath as he threw the car into park and jumped out after her. He jogged up the sidewalk and reached out to grab her by the shoulder. She turned around to face him.

“What the hell was that?” he demanded.

“I’m just going to walk,” she replied, wrapping her arms around herself.

“Jane, we’re in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. You can’t just get out and walk!”

“You’re gonna get a ticket,” she said, gesturing back to the car he’d left parked in the middle of a lane of traffic.

“Well then maybe you should get back in the car!”

She turned away from him again and started walking.

“What?” he shouted after her. “What did I do?”

She stopped and spun around. “You aren’t taking this seriously!”

“OK. Just get back in the car and we’ll talk about it.”

She shook her head.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “Everyone grows babies in test tubes nowadays anyway.”

She shook her head again. “The doctor said I wasn’t a good candidate.”

“So then we’ll find another doctor.”

“You aren’t listening to me, Adam.”

He came up to her and wrapped his arms around her. She allowed herself to rest her forehead against his chest for a moment. “Janie, we’ve got about 30 more seconds here before TMZ shows up,” he said softly in her ear, rubbing his hands up and down her arms to soothe her. “Let’s have this conversation at home.”

She looked up at him, and he saw her face crumble as she began to give way to tears. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “I wasted all that time. All those years, we could have been together. And now it’s too late.”

He reached to cup her face with his hands but she pushed him away again. “You should have married one of your 22 year olds,” she said.

He closed his eyes for a moment. “Oh for the love of God, Jane. Not this again.”

“I wish we never got back together,” she whispered. “Then I never would have known.”

He felt like she’d just taken a knife and stabbed him in the heart. He let his arms drop to his sides. “Get back in the car please,” he said flatly.

She spun around and walked away from him again. He stood and watched her for moment, but he was done running after her. There was only so much he could take. He kicked an empty soda bottle lying on the sidewalk next to his feet.  Then he turned and made his way back to his car.

He’d driven home by himself and spent the next 24 hours in a state of suspended animation, barely going through the motions at the recording studio, obsessively checking his phone. He’d expected her to cool off in a few hours, but she’d ended up spending the night somewhere else. She wasn’t answering texts. It went straight to voicemail when he tried to call. She must have turned her phone off.

That night he sat listening to her voicemail greeting and felt the bile rise in his throat. Were they back to this again? How many times was he supposed to call her this time? How many messages was he supposed to leave before she deigned to respond? He’d lain awake in bed all night, going over and over the same questions in his mind. Was this the end of it then? Was the only reason she’d married him because she wanted to have kids?

It was already getting dark the next day when he heard a car pull up outside and looked out the window to see her getting out of a cab. He wanted to be angry, but he only felt a wave of relief at the sight of her. At least it wasn’t over. He went downstairs to meet her.

 “I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking up at him with red-rimmed eyes as he opened the door.

He pulled her roughly into his arms. “Where were you?”

“A hotel.”

“You can’t just do that, Jane. You have to at least let me know you’re somewhere safe.”

“I’m a big girl, Adam.”

He tipped her face up to look up at him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “You’re right. I just needed a little time to process it.”

He felt his arms tighten around her spasmodically, and he bent down to kiss her. “We’ll figure it out together,” he said. “There are other ways. We can adopt, if it comes to that.”

She pressed her lips together for a moment, studying his face. “Would you want to do that?”

“Sure,” he said, attempting to shoot her a grin. “You can’t be a Hollywood A-lister these days without at least one adopted kid. The publicists will love it.”

She didn’t even crack a smile. “Tell me the truth,” she said. “You wouldn’t be disappointed not to have a baby of your own?”

“It would be our own.”

“You know what I mean.”

He did know what she meant. And the truth was, deep down in his heart of hearts, he knew the answer was yes. Yes, he would be disappointed. Yes, having a kid of his own was something he’d always imagined he would do. The idea of having a child together with her, creating a new life that blended the two of them together – it was something he wanted deeply. He wanted to look at his child and see the shape of her face combined with the freckles from the bridge of his nose. He wanted to hold that baby in his arms and know it had come from their love.

But he knew he couldn’t tell her that. There were some truths that needed to be buried deep, locked away, never allowed to see the light of day. There were some lies that were necessary.

 “Honestly,” he lied as he squeezed her gently in his arms, “It’s all the same to me. A kid is a kid. I’ll love it just the same.”

***

Jane laid alone, staring at the inside of her eyelids, wondering how much time had passed since Adam’s last visit, and when he might come back again. She didn’t have a great sense of time. She only knew there was no music playing right now. It didn’t matter. She’d become quite proficient at tuning to the radio station inside her head for entertainment.

She began scanning through the stations, hearing his voice inside her head. “What do you want to listen to today, little girl,” he’d asked her earlier. She heard his voice singing to her now. Yes, that was the song she wanted to hear. She’d always loved it when he sang that one, and the memory she had come to associate with it made it even sweeter. She lay in the dark, listening to the music in her head and reliving the past.

***

October 2013

Five minutes, the box said. Not that Jane needed to read it. She knew the drill by heart, she thought with a grim smile as she sat by herself on the cold marble floor of the master bathroom, watching the second hand of her watch make its slow way around the dial.

She heard a rustling sound coming from the bedroom. Was he awake? She stood abruptly, ready to stash the pregnancy test back under the sink before he could open the bathroom door, but she relaxed again as she heard the sound of him sighing in his sleep.

Adam didn’t know about this late-night ritual of hers. She kept her secret stock of pregnancy tests well hidden. They’d decided months ago to give up on having a child the old-fashioned way and look into adopting one instead. He’d been ready to get the ball rolling right away, but she’d wanted to take some time. There was no rush, after all, if she didn’t have to worry anymore about time running out on her biological clock. Why not take a year or two and enjoy just being a couple?

She hadn’t told him the real reason she was hesitating. Deep down inside, she wasn’t quite ready to give up hope. So she’d hidden a year’s supply of pregnancy tests in her makeup drawer and plastered a smile on her face, re-dedicating herself to the role into which she’d been cast for now: Mrs. Adam Levine.

Not that she could complain, she thought, feeling the familiar warmth creep back into her belly as she recalled the evening they’d just spent together. They were supposed to go to a Halloween party. She’d spent all week obsessing over what she should wear for a costume. Adam had refused to tell her what he was going as, just flashing that mischievous grin of his every time she tried to get it out of him. She’d eventually settled on some fangs and an Elvira wig. Not very original, she knew, but no one was going to be looking at her anyway.

She’d locked herself in the bathroom to get ready and heard him fumbling around in the bedroom outside. “Almost done?” he’d called to her through the door, jiggling the knob.”We’re going to be late!”

“Just a minute!” she’d called back, putting the finishing touches on her makeup. Then she took a deep breath and swung open the bathroom door.

Adam was standing in the middle of the bedroom in nothing but a pair of sunglasses and some low-cut black briefs.”Trick or treat!” he’d said with a grin.

“That’s your costume?”

 “What?” he slipped off the sunglasses and looked down at them innocently. “You don’t like it?”

"What are you even supposed to be?" she asked.

"A '70s porn star!"

“Adam, you cannot go out in public like that.”

He looked down at himself with a puzzled expression. “What’s wrong with it?”

She’d realized, of course, that he was teasing her. She broke into a smile and came toward him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You’ll get arrested for indecent exposure,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry,” he’d shrugged. “I know a lawyer.”

He’d put his arms around her waist then and started singing to her softly.

I've been really tryin’ baby,
Tryin to hold back these feelings for so long,
And if you feel like I feel baby,
Come on, oh come on.

Let's get it on…

They hadn’t made it to the party.

Jane felt the corners of her mouth quirk up in a smile again, remembering. No, she really had no cause to complain, did she? He knew well enough how to distract her from her problems. At least as long as he was awake. It was when he drifted off to sleep that the trouble always started. She would lie in the bed next to him, tossing and turning, unable to rest until she had snuck into the bathroom and peed on a stick.

She looked down at her watch again. It had been five minutes. Time to go look at the test and wave hello to her very good friend, Mr. Negative Sign - and then she’d be able to sleep at last. She picked the test up and glanced down at the single line staring back at her. She was about to wrap it up and toss it away, but something made her stop and look back down at it more closely. What was that? It was like a shadow – so faint. Was there something there? She held the test in her hand and angled it slightly as she squinted down at it. Maybe it was just the way the light was hitting it. But it seemed like it was getting a little darker now. There. There was no way she was imagining that. It was a line. A second line.

“Adam!” she cried, still gripping the test in her hand as she threw the bathroom door open. “Adam! Adam! It’s a second line!”