I worked, because the small consulting jobs I’d cobbled together were the only thing keeping the lights on now that everything larger had been taken.
I came home.
I did not cook so much as assemble food, standing up, over the sink.
And in the evenings I read the medical reports, again and again, the way a person picks at a scar.
The baker downstairs, a kind woman named Rosa who asked no questions, took to leaving a paper bag on my step some mornings — a roll, a pastry, the day-old things she couldn’t sell.
I don’t think she knew what she was doing for me.
She was the only person that whole year who treated me as though I were simply a neighbor and not a cautionary tale, and there were weeks when that paper bag was the single piece of evidence I had that I was still a person other people could see.
What saved me was not courage.
It was a stubbornness so deep it survived even my despair.
I had spent nights studying medical reports I could barely read, looking for the flaw in my body the way you’d worry a sore tooth — and somewhere in that miserable, obsessive reading, a small voice that hadn’t been fully silenced asked a question the story couldn’t answer. If you’re the reason, why did every embryo fail?