Chapter 1
THE YEARNING
“We should talk about kids. It’s been three years…”
I’ve been rehearsing this all day. In the shower, in the car, in the mirror at the restaurant bathroom while I fixed my lipstick and told myself just say it, Elena, just bring it up.
Like it’s some big reveal instead of the thing I’ve wanted since I was twenty-three years old and held my cousin’s newborn and felt the weight of her — six pounds, eleven ounces of warm, breathing miracle — settle into the crook of my arm and my chest cracked open with a fierce love for this baby and a bone-deep desire for one of my own.
Mark sets down his fork. Reaches across the table. Takes my hand.
“I want them, too,” he says. “You know I do.”
My heart does something stupid and enormous. We’ve been trying for kids for three years, but it’s felt like too much pressure to talk about how frustrated I am that I never seem to get pregnant. He’s always busy with work and business trips.
“Really?”
“Baby, I think about it all the time.” His thumb traces a slow circle on my knuckle. “A little girl with your eyes? Are you kidding me? I’d be done for.”
I laugh, and it comes out shaky and wet, and I press my free hand against my mouth because I am not going to cry in this restaurant. I’m not. But he just said a little girl with your eyes and my whole chest is cracking open.
“I’m thirty-six,” I say.
“You’re thirty-six and gorgeous.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I lace my fingers through his. “I mean the window is — it’s not forever. I read this article about AMH levels after thirty-five and—”
“Hey.” He squeezes my hand. Leans forward so his face is close and I can smell his cologne and the Barolo on his breath. “We’re going to have a family. I married you because I want a life with you. The whole thing — kids, Saturday morning pancakes, the disgusting minivan. All of it.”
“You’d drive a minivan?”
“For you? I’d drive a minivan with a bumper sticker.”
I’m laughing again. Actually laughing, the kind that loosens the knot I’ve been carrying in my stomach all week. He lifts my hand and kisses my knuckles — soft, warm, his lips lingering — and I feel it everywhere.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you more.” He grins. “Now eat your short ribs before they get cold. You know how you get when your blood sugar drops.”
“How do I get?”
“Feral.”
“I do not get feral —”
“You bit me once.”
“That was foreplay!”
He throws his head back and laughs, and the couple at the next table glances over, and I don’t care.
I don’t care because my husband just said a little girl with your eyes and I can see it — I can see the whole thing so clearly it hurts.
A Sunday morning. Pancake batter on the counter.
A toddler in a high chair with Mark’s jaw and my hair, syrup on her fingers, and Mark pretending to eat her toes while she shrieks.
I want it so much my teeth ache.
“The timing’s the only thing,” Mark says, cutting into his short rib. “I’ve got the Henderson deal closing next month, and after that my schedule opens up. I want to be present for it, you know? Not some stressed-out wreck who misses the ultrasounds.”
“You wouldn’t miss the ultrasounds.”
“I wouldn’t. That’s my point.” He points his fork at me. “I want to do this right. I want to be the guy who’s at every appointment, building the crib, doing the breathing classes—”
“Lamaze.”
“Lamaze, Bradley, whatever. I’ll do all of them. I’ll be the most annoying dad in the delivery room.”
“You’ll pass out.”
“I will absolutely pass out. And then I’ll get back up and cut the cord.”
I’m smiling so hard my cheeks hurt. This is what I needed. Not a plan, not a spreadsheet — just Mark, looking at me like we’re building something, telling me he sees the same future I see.
He takes a sip of wine. “What about Isabella?”
My breath catches. “What?”
“For a name. Isabella. After your grandmother.”
I stare at him. I have never said that name out loud to anyone. It’s been mine — a private thing I’ve carried for years, a name I whisper to myself when I’m imagining the nursery, the soft yellow walls, the crib by the window. I’ve never told him because saying it out loud felt like jinxing it.
But he knew. He knew.
“How did you—”
“You talk in your sleep sometimes.” His eyes are soft, steady, completely serious. “You said it once, a couple months ago. I remember it’s your grandmother’s name.”
My vision blurs. I press both hands over my mouth and I am definitely crying now, in this restaurant, mascara be damned.
“Don’t cry,” he says, but he’s smiling, and his voice is thick too. “Come on. You’re going to make me cry and I have a reputation.”
“Isabella,” I whisper.
“Isabella.” He lifts his glass. “To the most spoiled little girl in Southern California.”
I lift mine. The crystal rings when they touch.
We drive home with the windows down and his hand on my knee and a song I don’t recognize playing low on the radio. The September air is warm and I lean my head against the headrest and close my eyes and feel the wine in my blood and the future in my chest — huge, golden, so close I can taste it.
Mark carries me from the car because I took my heels off in the driveway and the gravel is sharp. I loop my arms around his neck and bury my face in his collar and breathe him in — cedar and clean cotton and the fading warmth of cologne.
I brush my teeth. Wash my face. Pull on the old Stanford t-shirt I’ve slept in since grad school, and climb into bed.
He slides in next to me and pulls me against his chest and I press my ear to his heartbeat and think: Isabella. Isabella Carmichael-Reed. We’re going to have you, baby. I promise.
I finish the smoothie on the nightstand.
Mark turns off the light.
The paper gown crinkles every time I shift, which is a lot because I cannot sit still on this exam table.
Dr. Patricia Anand has been my PCP since I moved back to San Diego after grad school.
She delivered the news about my mother’s bone density.
She prescribed the anxiety meds I took for six months after my father’s heart surgery.
She is calm, direct, and does not sugarcoat, which is why I’m here instead of Googling my symptoms at two in the morning like a normal person.
“So,” she says, flipping through my chart on her tablet. “What brings you in?”
“I can’t get pregnant.”
She looks up. “How long have you been trying?”
“Actively? Three years. But we haven’t used protection for probably longer than that. Since the first year of our marriage, basically.”
She sets the tablet down. “And you’re not using any form of birth control? No IUD, no pill, no—”
“Nothing. No condoms, no pill, nothing. We have sex regularly.” My face heats.
I don’t know why this is embarrassing — she’s my doctor — but saying we have sex regularly in a paper gown under fluorescent lighting while my feet dangle off the table is not my most dignified moment.
“Three, four times a week, usually. Mark has a high...” I gesture vaguely. “Drive.”
“And your periods?”
“Regular. Twenty-eight to thirty days, like clockwork. I track them on an app.” I pull out my phone and show her the screen — a calendar of pink dots stretching back three years, so consistent it looks algorithmic. “I know when I’m ovulating. I know the window. We hit it every month.”
She studies the screen, scrolling back through the months. “And no pregnancies at all? No missed periods? Miscarriages?”
“Last month I was fourteen days late. I took four tests.” I swallow. “All negative.”
The memory lives in my body — crouched on the bathroom floor at six in the morning, watching the single pink line materialize on the fourth stick while Mark slept down the hall.
I buried them in the trash before he woke up.
I didn’t want him to see. He would have been sweet about it, and I didn’t want sweet. I wanted a second line.
“That must have been very difficult,” Dr. Anand says.
“I’m fine.” I’m not fine. My voice sounds like stepping on glass. “I just want to know what’s wrong with me.”
“Elena.” She rolls her stool closer. “There may not be anything wrong with you. But it is unusual, given what you’re describing — regular cycles, no contraception, frequent intercourse over several years — that you haven’t conceived.
At minimum, I’d want to run some bloodwork.
Check your thyroid, your hormone levels, your FSH. ”
“Okay. Whatever you need.”
“And I’d also recommend seeing a reproductive endocrinologist. A fertility specialist.” She says it carefully, watching my face. “They can do a more comprehensive workup — an HSG to check for blockages, an ultrasound to evaluate your ovarian reserve—”
“A fertility specialist.”
The words land in my stomach like stones.
I know it’s the logical next step. I know that. But there’s a difference between we’re trying and we need medical intervention, and that difference feels like a canyon I’m not sure I’m ready to stand at the edge of.
Because if I see a fertility specialist and they tell me nothing’s wrong — the same unexplained answer I already feel coming — then the problem isn’t medical.
The problem is something else. Something worse.
Something that means maybe this just isn’t going to happen for me, and I don’t know who I am if I accept that.
Does it mean that I can’t have babies? That Mark can’t give me babies?
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Can I think about it?”
“Of course. There’s no rush.” She pauses. “How does your husband feel about all this?”
I pick at the edge of the paper gown. A tiny tear spreads under my thumbnail.
“He wants kids. He does. He talks about it — names, the nursery, he even said he’d drive a minivan.
” I smile, but it feels fragile. “I just think he’s getting a little.
.. tired. Of the whole thing. The tracking, the timing, me crying every month when my period comes.
He never says it, but I can feel it — this flinch when I bring it up, like he’s bracing himself. ”
It’s the first time I’ve said this to anyone and the truth of it aches in my throat.
“I don’t want to be the wife who turns sex into a chore,” I say.
“I don’t want him to dread the conversation.
And if I start going to fertility clinics, if we start doing IVF or whatever comes next — that’s a whole production.
Shots, appointments, hormones. I don’t want to put him through that if he’s already. ..”
I trail off. Dr. Anand waits.
“He loves me,” I say. “I know he loves me. I just don’t want this to be the thing that breaks us.”
“Elena.” Her voice is kind but firm, the way she gets when she’s about to say something I need to hear.
“You deserve answers. Whether that’s a specialist now or more bloodwork first, you deserve to know what’s happening in your body.
And a good partner — a partner who wants this with you — will show up for that process. Even the hard parts.”
I nod. Blink fast.
“Let’s start with the labs,” she says. “And think about the referral. You don’t have to decide today.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She squeezes my knee through the paper gown and stands. “I’ll have the nurse come in for the draw. We’ll have results in a week.”
She leaves, and I sit on the exam table in my paper gown and stare at the anatomical poster on the wall — the female reproductive system, cross-sectioned and labeled in clinical blue.
Fallopian tubes. Ovaries. Uterus. All the machinery of motherhood, diagrammed like an engine schematic, and mine is supposedly running fine.
My phone buzzes in my purse on the chair.
Mark: How’s the appointment?
I chew my lip. I could tell him. Dr. Anand said fertility specialist and it’s sitting in my chest like a bird I swallowed.
But I imagine his face — the careful patience, the way he’d nod and say whatever you need, baby, while something behind his eyes shifts, recalculates, absorbs the weight of another thing I’m asking him to carry.
Just a checkup, I type. All good.
Three dots.
Mark: ?? Thai tonight?
Thai’s great.
I put the phone down. Press my palm flat against my lower stomach — warm skin, flat, empty. The place where Isabella is supposed to be.
“Soon,” I whisper.
The nurse knocks and opens the door with a tray of labeled vials and a rubber tourniquet, and I hold out my arm and look away and think about yellow walls.