Her phone cracked down onto the granite.
“My son married you five years ago, and you still can’t give him a child.
I lose sleep over it every night — and you have the nerve to complain to me about your stomach?”
I had swallowed that particular knife for half a decade.
In the early years I used to explain — the doctors, the treatments, the patience it all required.
There had been a time, in the first year or two, when that barb could still cut me to the bone.
I wanted a child.
Shane and I had spent long, hopeful, exhausting months on it, and every failed cycle was a small private grief I carried mostly alone, because grief was inconvenient to that household.
Marlene had taken my most tender wound and sharpened it into a weekly weapon — as though my body’s silence were a personal insult to her, a debt I was refusing to pay.
And the terrible thing, the thing I only understood much later, is that I let her.