After the embryos were lost, I stopped talking about having a baby.
Not because I had stopped wanting one.
I had simply run out of ways to say how much it hurt.
There was no longer a date to circle on the calendar or an appointment to prepare for. Nothing remained except the knowledge that the future I had pictured was no longer waiting for us.
Julian seemed to change after that.
At first, I thought the change was grief.
He worked later.
He answered emails during dinner and took calls in the hallway when we were supposed to be watching a movie together.
His position at Kensington Dynamics demanded more of him, he said.
The company had been connected to his family for years. His relatives had helped establish it, and its success meant more to him than a paycheck.
He wanted influence.
He wanted a stronger position in the family's private investment trust.
He wanted to be one of the people whose decisions shaped the company's future.
I understood ambition.
What I didn't understand was why there never seemed to be enough time for us anymore.
Sometimes, I would wake in the middle of the night and find his side of the bed empty.
He would be in his office with the door partly closed, the light from his computer falling across his face.
"Are you coming to bed?"
"In a minute."
I would lie back down.
Sometimes I fell asleep before he came in.
Other times, I heard the mattress shift long after midnight.
I told myself we were adjusting.
We had lost something enormous.
Perhaps we were both trying to find a way to live with it.
I buried myself in work, too.
My career gave me a place where effort still produced visible results. I could complete a project, answer a difficult question, and see something finished at the end of the day.
At home, everything felt unfinished.
The baby socks stayed in my dresser.
I couldn't throw them away.
I couldn't look at them for long, either.
So I left them where they were and pretended I had forgotten about them.
Chloe Evans became the person I leaned on most.
She had been my closest friend long before my mother's illness, but those months brought us closer.
She knew how to sit beside me without demanding that I explain myself.
She knew when to bring food and when to leave it on the counter without asking whether I planned to eat.
When my mother was in the hospital, Chloe sometimes called me on her drive home from work.
She would talk about ordinary things until I could remember that the world still contained them.
Once, she brought groceries to our house and found me sitting on the couch in yesterday's clothes.
I hadn't showered.
I hadn't answered several messages from work.
I couldn't remember what I had eaten.
Chloe put the bags down and sat beside me.
"You can't keep trying to do everything at once."
I stared at my hands.
"I don't know what else to do."
"Then do one thing."
She stayed until I ate something.
That was Chloe.
At least, that was the Chloe I believed I knew.
After my mother died, she continued checking on me. She brought dinner when she thought I might be too tired to cook, and she listened when grief arrived at inconvenient times.
Sometimes, I talked about the embryos.
I told her about the four that had been frozen and the two I had thought about constantly.
I told her how unfair it seemed that I had spent years trying to become a mother, only to lose the chance before I could even attempt the transfer.
Chloe never told me to be positive.
She never said I could always adopt or that everything happened for a reason.
I appreciated that.
One evening, I admitted something I had barely allowed myself to think.
"What if it just never happens for me?"
We were sitting in my living room.
The rain tapped against the windows, and a mug of tea had gone cold on the table between us.
Chloe turned toward me.
"Then we'll figure out what a good life looks like for you."
I looked down.
"I wanted it so badly."
"I know."
"I don't know who I'm supposed to be if I can't have that."
She reached for my hand.
"You're still Sarah."
I started crying again.
Chloe moved closer and held me while I tried to get the words out.
She told me that my life could still be full, even if it didn't look the way I had imagined.
I remembered that conversation for years.
I remembered the room, the cold tea, and the way she had spoken as if she were protecting something fragile inside me.
I never thought to wonder what she might have been hiding.
By then, Julian and I had become experts at living beside each other.
We knew when the other person was working late. We knew which bills needed paying and which groceries were running low.
We had stopped asking the kinds of questions that required honest answers.
How are you?
Fine.
How was your day?
Busy.
Do you want to go out this weekend?
Maybe.
The conversations were easy because neither of us expected anything from them.
I occasionally tried to change that.
I suggested dinner at a restaurant we used to enjoy. I asked whether he wanted to take a short trip when work slowed down.
He agreed sometimes.
Other times, he said he had too much to do.
I accepted his answers because I was tired of being disappointed.
I also accepted something else.
I began to believe that the loss of our embryos had changed Julian in a way I couldn't repair.
He had once been so certain about becoming a father.
Now he rarely mentioned children.
I assumed the subject hurt him as much as it hurt me.
Perhaps he had decided that talking about it would only make things worse.
Perhaps he was trying to protect me.
I never considered that he might have stopped talking about our future because he had begun building another one.
There were small things I noticed.
His phone seemed to be with him more often.
He took it into the bathroom.
He turned it facedown when we sat together.
Occasionally, a message would arrive late at night, and he would check it before returning to whatever he had been doing.
I asked once whether something was wrong at work.
"No. Why?"
"You seem distracted."
He gave a small laugh.
"It's a demanding quarter."
That was enough for me.
I wanted it to be enough.
The truth was that I had become frightened of what I might find if I pushed too hard. I had already lost my mother and the embryos. I didn't know how much more grief I could take.
So I kept the peace.
I told myself our marriage was going through a difficult period.
I told myself that love didn't always look warm.
I told myself that people who had been together for years sometimes became quieter without becoming less devoted.
Those explanations allowed me to get through ordinary days.
They also allowed Julian to keep living a life I knew almost nothing about.
The discovery came on an ordinary afternoon.
Julian had left his second work phone charging in the guest bedroom.
I had gone in looking for a folder I thought he might have left on the desk. The phone lit up while I was searching.
A message appeared.
The name at the top was Chloe.
For a moment, I didn't move.
I knew she had Julian's number. Of course she did. They had known each other for years through me, and there were plenty of ordinary reasons she might contact him.
Then I read the message.
It was affectionate.
Too affectionate for what I thought their relationship was.
I picked up the phone.
I wish I could say I immediately put it down and demanded an explanation.
Instead, I stood there and looked at the screen, trying to find an innocent meaning in words that had already made my stomach tighten.
I opened the conversation.
There were more messages.
Then more.
Some were recent.
Some went back months.
I scrolled slowly at first, then faster as the pattern became impossible to deny.
There were references to hotel bookings.
There were plans that explained why Julian had sometimes been unavailable.
There were photographs I could barely bring myself to look at.
They had been together for eight months.
Eight months.
While Chloe sat on my couch and listened to me talk about my marriage.
While Julian kissed me goodbye before leaving for work.
While I tried to accept that the life we had planned might never happen.
I sat on the edge of the guest bed.
The phone felt heavy in my hand.
I read enough to know there was no misunderstanding.
Then I read more because some part of me still wanted to find a sentence that would make the rest of it less terrible.
There wasn't one.
I put the phone back on the charger.
I walked into the bathroom and washed my face.
I stood in front of the mirror until my breathing became steady enough to speak.
When Julian came home, I was waiting in the living room.
He looked at me, then at the phone on the table.
He understood immediately.
I had expected denial.
I had expected him to say that the messages were out of context or that I had misunderstood something.
Instead, he looked irritated.
"What did you see?"
I stared at him.
"How long?"
He exhaled through his nose.
"Sarah."
"How long have you been sleeping with Chloe?"
He glanced toward the window.
"About eight months."
The answer was so direct that I briefly forgot what I had asked.
Eight months.
I thought about all the times she had held my hand.
All the times she had asked how things were going with Julian.
All the times she had told me I deserved happiness.
"Why?"
It was the only question I could manage.
Julian sat down across from me.
He didn't reach for my hand.
He didn't look ashamed.
He said our marriage had been over for a long time.
I stared at him, waiting for him to hear what he had just said.
"Not to me."
He looked away.
And that was when I understood something I had spent years refusing to consider.
We had not been struggling through the same marriage.
I had been trying to save ours.
He had already left it.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: My Closest Friend Apologized for Betraying Me, but Neither of Them Could Explain Why They Had Let Me Trust Them
I Thought Losing the Chance to Become a Mother Was the Worst Thing My Husband Could Ever Do to Me
Part 2 of 16
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