For Eight Years I Carried the Blame for Our Childlessness. My Mother-in-Law Went Pale When She Realized He Still Didn’t Know the Truth Was His

It costs too much.

It always, in the end, costs everything.

Chapter 6 — The Carried Blame

I want to stop here, before the machinery of it all begins to turn, and tell you what those eight years were, because the numbers and the courtrooms that come later are the easy part of this story, and this is the hard part.

For eight years, I carried a blame that was not mine, for a defect that was not mine, at the request of a woman who loved her son more than she loved the truth, and out of a love of my own that I mistook, for far too long, for virtue.

I underwent four surgeries.