The waiting was harder than I expected.
Once I had submitted the request, there was nothing to do but wait for the clinic to respond.
I checked my email too often.
Every time a notification appeared, my stomach tightened.
Most of them were ordinary messages from work, bills, and reminders I had forgotten to turn off.
I began leaving my phone in another room while I made breakfast.
It helped a little.
I also stopped looking at the photograph Julian had sent after the twins were born.
I had saved it because deleting it felt too much like admitting that the moment had happened.
But I did not need to look at it every day.
The baby's face was already in my mind.
I could remember the pale gray-blue eyes, the shape of his nose, and the small crease near his mouth.
I could remember how Eleanor had watched me when I noticed the resemblance.
I could remember Julian's expression when I asked why the baby looked like me.
Those memories were real.
The conclusion I had started building around them was not yet a fact.
I needed to keep those things separate.
A few days later, Eleanor called to ask whether I had received anything from the clinic.
“Not yet,” I told her.
“I'm sorry.”
“You don't have to apologize for the delay.”
“I know. I just wish there were something I could do.”
“Tell me if you remember a specific conversation. Something Julian said, or a date when he told you about the failure.”
“I will.”
We spoke briefly about ordinary things after that.
Eleanor asked how work was going.
I asked how she was managing with the twins in the house.
It felt strange to speak to her about everyday matters when so much remained unresolved.
But I was grateful that she did not keep pushing me toward a conclusion.
Before we hung up, she said, “You can come back whenever you're ready.”
I thanked her.
I did not promise that I would.
The next message from Chloe arrived the following evening.
She had sent copies of the messages she had shown me at the café.
I saved them in a folder and wrote down when she had sent them.
I did not reply beyond thanking her for preserving the conversation.
There was no point in asking her to interpret the words again.
I had read them.
They said what they said.
They did not say what I most needed to know.
That was the part I had to accept.
For years, I had wanted a single conversation that would make everything clear.
I had imagined that if I could just get Julian to sit down and speak honestly, the confusion would lift.
Now I understood that honesty could not be forced out of someone by asking the same question more painfully.
If he had information he was withholding, I could not make him hand it over simply by explaining how much I deserved it.
I could, however, stop treating his refusal as the end of the matter.
The clinic's response arrived the following week.
I was at work when I saw the email.
I read the subject line once, then closed it.
I did not want to open it between meetings, with coworkers walking past my desk and my phone buzzing beside my keyboard.
I waited until I got home.
Then I washed my hands, changed out of my work clothes, and made tea.
The envelope was on the kitchen table where I had left it.
I moved the cup away from the papers and opened the message.
The clinic had acknowledged my request and explained the next steps for providing the available records.
Some documents would require additional processing.
They would contact me if further verification was needed.
There was no dramatic revelation.
No explanation of the embryos.
No answer about the baby.
Just a confirmation that the request was being handled.
I felt disappointed anyway.
I had let myself imagine that the first email might settle everything.
Instead, I had another period of waiting.
I printed the message and placed it with the other documents.
Then I went outside for a walk.
The evening was cool, and the sidewalks were damp from rain.
I walked past the small grocery store where Julian and I used to buy ingredients for dinner.
I passed the bus stop where I had once waited after a treatment appointment because I did not want to go home and see how worried he looked.
I remembered calling Chloe from that stop.
She had stayed on the phone with me until the bus came.
At the time, I had thought that was what friendship looked like.
Now the memory hurt in a different way.
I did not know whether she had felt guilty during that call.
I did not know what she had told herself afterward.
I knew only that she had comforted me while keeping a secret that would eventually break our friendship.
I kept walking.
When I got home, I found another message from Julian.
It was longer than his earlier texts.
He said he regretted the way he had handled the end of our marriage.
He said the twins deserved peace and that the situation was becoming painful for everyone.
He asked me to stop involving his mother and Chloe in questions about the past.
I read the message twice.
He had not mentioned the records.
He had not answered any of my questions.
He had not explained why the baby's resemblance had affected him so much.
He had simply asked me to stop.
I began typing a reply.
I wrote that he had been the one to tell me the embryos were lost.
I wrote that he had been the one who had told me the clinic had confirmed it.
I wrote that he had used my infertility to hurt me when he sent the photograph.
Then I deleted the whole message.
I did not want another argument that ended with him telling me I was too emotional to think clearly.
Instead, I wrote a shorter response.
I will not ask you to explain anything you are unwilling to explain. I will continue requesting my own records. Please do not contact me about this unless you have specific information relevant to those records.
I read it once before sending.
Then I put the phone away.
I felt no triumph.
There was no satisfaction in setting a boundary with someone I had once expected to grow old beside.
But the boundary was mine.
The next day, I returned to the list I had been keeping.
I crossed out the questions I had already asked and added the new information I had received.
I marked which items were supported by documents, which were supported only by messages, and which remained unanswered.
It was not a perfect system.
It was simply a way to stop every fear from becoming a fact in my head.
I wrote the baby's resemblance in the last section.
Beside it, I added: Observation, not conclusion.
Then I underlined it.
That evening, I took the treatment calendar out again.
I flipped through the pages slowly, stopping at the notes I had made during the hardest months.
There were days when I had written nothing.
There were days when I had recorded medication times in neat handwriting, as if being organized could make the process less frightening.
Near one appointment, I had drawn a tiny heart.
I could not remember doing it.
I sat with the calendar open for a long time.
The woman who had drawn that heart had believed that careful planning and trust would carry her through.
I felt tenderness toward her, even though I wished she had asked more questions.
She had not been foolish for wanting to believe her husband.
She had been exhausted and frightened and trying to survive something that had taken over her life.
I could admit that without pretending every choice I made had been wise.
I closed the calendar and put it beside the envelope.
For the first time since Eleanor's call, I did not feel the need to solve everything before going to bed.
The questions were still there.
The records were still pending.
Julian was still refusing to explain himself, and Chloe's messages still left more gaps than answers.
But I had stopped letting those gaps dictate what I believed.
I turned off the kitchen light.
The envelope remained on the table, beside the calendar and the list I had written by hand.
I would return to them when there was something new to examine.
Until then, I would let the unanswered questions remain unanswered.
That was not the same as giving up.
It was the first honest thing I had done for myself in a long time.
Click here to continue reading: PART 13: The Clinic Finally Sent My Records, and I Had to Decide Whether I Was Ready to Read What I Had Spent Years Avoiding
I Thought Losing the Chance to Become a Mother Was the Worst Thing My Husband Could Ever Do to Me
Part 12 of 16
