I don’t know why that one — maybe because the spring had been kind, maybe because I was tired of protecting myself from hope.
I bought a small yellow blanket and hid it in a drawer, the way you’d hide something shameful, because wanting a thing that badly had started to feel shameful.
When that cycle failed too, I took the blanket out to the trash myself, at night, so Weston wouldn’t see it and I wouldn’t have to watch his face arrange itself into that patient, terrible sympathy.
I told myself I was protecting him from my grief.
I understand now that I had it backwards — that I had been trained, cycle by cycle, to protect everyone from my grief except the person who had manufactured it.
There were two-week waits that stretched like years, and phone calls that ended my hope in a single practiced sentence from a nurse who delivered that sentence twenty times a day.
And every time it failed, the failure had a name, and the name was mine.
That’s the part I need you to understand, because it’s the hinge the whole story turns on.
It was never presented as our failure, or as a mystery, or as bad luck.
It was presented as me.