The pills floated on the top of the water. Funny, she thought they would sink before she flushed them, but they floated, giving her a chance to change her mind. A false chance. She knew they were already dissolving.
Of course, she thought a lot of things would be different. Her husband. Her marriage. Her divorce. If she had tried to imagine it, she would have imagined her remarriage as being different, too. It probably would have involved love. At least, a declaration of love. Instead, she was forced to take things into her own hands.
She placed the birth control wheel back up into her cabinet, where she always kept it, where it had the appearance of consistency of action. She would be consistent, in following days, though not in the kind that she would insist of later.
It wasn't the first time she had committed such a fallacy. After her first son, she had wanted a daughter. But her husband had wanted to wait, to put a few years between this one and the next. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't in control of her pills and whether or not she took them. But the child was a boy.
She hadn't dared to hope this next baby would be a daughter. She only hoped it would bring him back to her. They acted in parts of a play titled Independence, except at night, when he joined here in the not-a-marriage-anymore bed. But she was tired of pretending that this arrangement pleased her. She could forgive any faults he had that led to the divorce if only to escape the ruse. She knew that he would forgive her faults only if it meant legitimizing another child with his name. She knew what he valued.
She couldn't contemplate on the effect on her mind, the deceit's wearing of her soul, the questions it would arise from others who would judge. She couldn't do with her present circumstance but couldn't do without him.
In another world, she swallowed the pills and found the will to find another existence. Another solution that involved truths, declarations of love and regret, and the risk of rejection. But that was another world where she was a different person.