Two years of grief.

Two years of quietly, privately blaming my own body, apologizing to him for it, watching his face do sympathy while some part of him — I could see it now, reconstructed in horrible clarity — was relieved every month the test was negative.

He had needed me distracted.

A woman grieving a child that won’t come is a woman who isn’t reading the financial statements, isn’t asking about the study safe, isn’t noticing that her family’s estate has quietly become a chip in a game she was never told she was playing.

My grief hadn’t been a private tragedy we shared.

It had been cover.