There is a particular exhaustion to wanting something that much and watching your own body be discussed as a problem to be solved, and I lived inside that exhaustion for the better part of two years.

Mike did not live inside it with me.

That was the thing I understood too late.

He stood outside it, tapping his watch, and somewhere in those two years he stopped seeing a wife he was going through something with and started seeing a project that was running over budget and behind schedule.

And in our final month, after a test at his own private clinic came back with numbers he decided were the end of the conversation, he told me — casually, the way you might mention the weather — that I simply was not built for motherhood.

And then he packed a bag, and he left, and he took with him the forty thousand dollars of medical debt from the treatments he had insisted on and left it, somehow, entirely with me.