Hartwell told me my fertility was normal, the relief was enormous, but underneath the relief was something colder and harder to name: a kind of vertigo, the sensation of discovering that a fact you had built years of your life around had been planted there, deliberately, by someone who watched you suffer over it and said nothing.

He had not only stolen my money and my marriage.

He had, for three years, stolen the truth of my own body from me, and let me blame myself for the theft.

That is a thing I did not know a person could do to another person.

I know it now.

It is why I do the work I do.