My fertility was completely, entirely normal.

I sat down on the edge of Arthur’s guest bed when she told me, and I did not cry, though I had expected to.

What I felt was too large and too cold for crying.

Julian had not left me because I could not give him children.

He had discovered, at some point, that he wanted to be rid of me — for a younger woman, for his mother’s approval, for reasons I would never fully know — and rather than divorce me and split what was ours, he had manufactured a lie so cruel and so total that it would let him discard me and keep everything, while the whole world nodded and murmured that poor Julian had done his best with a broken wife.

He had not just betrayed me.