You only arrive there that quickly about a person you were always, secretly, prepared to think the worst of.

And I looked at him — this man I had chosen, whose children I had carried five times, whose disappointment I had spent eight years trying to cure — and I saw, for one clear and terrible second, that he had never quite trusted me.

Not really.

Not underneath.

All the tenderness of nine years had been real, I think, but it had been sitting on top of something that had never fully believed in me, and the birthmark had simply cracked the surface and let me see down to it.

That was the wound.