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

Four.

I have the scars.

I lay on tables and let doctors go looking, again and again, for the flaw in me that did not exist, because the flaw was in him and I had promised to hide it.

I gave myself injections in my own stomach in clinic bathrooms, hormones that made me weep and rage and swell, chasing a pregnancy that was never, ever going to come, because the problem had never been in my body at all.

And the very worst of it, the memory I cannot fully forgive myself for tolerating, is this: I would wake from the anesthesia, sick and aching, and the first thing I would do — the very first thing — was apologize to my husband.

For failing him.