Chapter 2: My Brilliant Wife When people say she's the brightest witch of her age, they don't even know the half of it. She has discipline. She has drive. She is stubborn and correct until proven wrong. She catalogs small details — colored light bouncing across walls with each turn of a crystal glass, the folds in parchment that indicate how long a letter has been pressed in a pocket, the song of a bird on your windowsill as it mimics the tune on the radio — but she would never bore you with these discoveries in the moment. No, she holds onto them until weeks later when the bird finally coos back an entire Celestina Warbeck verse, and when you mention how extraordinary it is, she just shrugs and says, "Yes, he's been doing that. Clever, isn't he?" When she puts two and two together to make four, it's a stunning thing to witness. From losing a wristwatch to finding a loophole in a law, her mind can separate the necessary and the mundane, sifting through details that feel completely out of place until they click like a puzzle in her mind. She is sharp. She is thoughtful. She is vigilant. She need only have a piece of the whole in order to craft a hypothesis. So when she gets the flu and spends a full week with stomach cramps and exhaustion… When she's upending her breakfast into the toilet for several weeks after… I don't even bother asking the question. Because she's the brightest witch of her age. I watch her excuse herself from morning meetings, returning grey-faced and glassy-eyed, and I know I must be imagining things because… there's just no possible way she wouldn't know. I sit with her in the bath, letting my hands wander along her sides as she reads to me, and my hands slip to her belly, searching for a sign. She turns over her shoulder and smiles at me — and I think, this is it. This is the moment she tells me that it's true. But instead she winks, dropping the book and twisting around in my arms, sliding her soapy body over mind, mistaking my wandering wands for arousal instead of research. But who am I to stop her as she straddles my legs in the water. Her hands glide over my shoulders as mine slot our hips together. And when she's rising and falling over me, sloshing water over the sides, the suds drip down her breasts. And I know they're larger. I know it as if they were my own — because they are mine. I've mapped them and pleasured them and f****d them and come on them and they are swollen. Her head falls back, breath panting harshly, and I say, "Are you pregnant?" She laughs, her face tilting back to mine, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, ready to poke fun. But her hips pause. And her face freezes. And I watch her click the pieces into place. The details she was too clever to notice. My stupid, brilliant wife.