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Janice
As her crying abated, Jack suggested she go wash her face while he made her a cup of tea. Janice dragged herself from the bed with effort and walked the few steps to the master bath.
She barely recognized the face that stared back at her from the mirror. Swollen, blotchy and tear-streaked, it was a grotesque parody of the Janice Fleming who had stood here a few days ago. There was no sparkle in her eyes, no roses in her cheeks -- her hair was dull and lackluster, reminding her of the time when she had let her family down before. When Jack had been ill with the plague.
"No!" Furious with herself, she turned the water on and began to scrub. Finally brushing her hair, she winced as it caught in the tangles. But that was all right -- pain was good right now. It made her alert and forced her to do what she needed to do. Janice might not like the situation, but it was up to her to make it successful and to keep her family from falling apart because of it.
"Janice?"
"In the bathroom, Jack. Be right out." She looked in the mirror again. Her reflection wasn't the best, but it was certainly better than a few minutes ago. Appearance was everything at this point -- no matter how she felt.
Jack looked up as she came back into the bedroom. "You look a lot better, Jan. The kids are in bed. Mark, too." He added the last as an afterthought, separating Mark from the twins in a way he had never done before. Mark was eighteen after all. A man for all intents and purposes, especially with the task set before him now.
He struggled to keep the thought from his mind, but it was impossible. Janice had picked up a folder from the dresser and handed it to him silently before sitting down on the edge of the bed. "What's this?" Jack asked as he opened it up. "Oh."
Janice nodded in agreement as her husband riffled through the sheets inside. It was basically an instruction manual dealing with what could and might and probably would go wrong and what to do to remedy all of those things.
"As you can see, Mark and I were deemed... compatible." Janice said quietly. "I suppose we should have... today... you know... but I just couldn't, Jack. I just couldn't, dammit!"
Jack slipped his arm around his wife. "Let me take a look at this for a sec, Jan. I'll make sense of it and we'll work it all out. Everything is going to be okay. It's your duty. Our duty. Like it or not, we don't have any choice here. The decision was made for us."
She smiled at her husband, though it didn't extend to her eyes. How easy it was for him to say our when it really had nothing to do with him. Just her. And Mark. Their son. No, that wasn't fair either. It did affect Jack as well.
Please God, let everything be all right, she prayed silently. It would be all over as soon as she was pregnant. And they said she was especially fertile right now. All it would take would be one time, maybe two. She had gotten pregnant quickly with Jack. Okay, maybe three times at most. It was the best she could hope for.
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