Alex and Elena had spent nearly three grueling years trying to start a family.

What had begun with excitement and hope had dissolved, gradually, into a landscape of specialist appointments, and blood panels, and long, heavy, suffocating silences at the dinner table.

A fertility doctor had eventually explained that some of Elena’s reproductive numbers were poor, though, Alex would remember later, he had never once used the word impossible.

But Alex had heard the word he feared most anyway, heard it in the spaces between the doctor’s careful phrases, because he had come to those appointments already braced for the worst, already primed by another voice, closer to home, to hear a verdict of barrenness where the doctor had offered only difficulty.

I will not dwell on the medical particulars, because they belong to Elena as much as to him and are not the point of this story; it is enough to say that the couple faced real difficulty conceiving, that the difficulty was presented to them as belonging to Elena, and that Alex, in his fear and his susceptibility to a certain relentless pressure, allowed himself to believe that his wife was the reason they could not have a child.