And when it didn’t happen, the failure had a name from the very beginning, and the name was mine.

There were the injections I learned to give myself in the bathroom before work, my hands steady out of practice rather than calm.

There were the surgeries.

There were the losses that never made it far enough to be called anything, that the doctors recorded with clinical words while I sat in the car afterward and grieved things that had never had a heartbeat.

And there was his mother, who had a gift for arithmetic.

She could turn any conversation, in three sentences, into a tally of what I had failed to provide.

A real wife, she liked to say, gives her husband children.

She said it the way you’d remark on the weather, and Cassian never once corrected her, and after a while I stopped waiting for him to.

Through all of it, he was so good.

That is the thing no one believes until they’ve lived it.

He held my hand in the waiting rooms.

He kissed my forehead after the bad appointments.

He told me, again and again, that we were a team, that it was us against the problem, that he would never leave me over something that wasn’t my fault.

I built my whole endurance on those words.