Chapter 2
ANOTHER ROUND OF SYMPATHY
“I started my period this morning.”
Nadia sets her Aperol spritz down and looks at me the way she’s been looking at me ever since I started trying to get pregnant — careful, soft, the kind of expression you’d give someone who keeps walking into the same glass door.
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m fine.” I take a long sip of my Sancerre. “I’m totally fine. It’s fine.”
“You said fine three times.”
“Because I’m fine, Nadia.”
She doesn’t push. She just reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine and squeezes, and I let her, because the alternative is pulling away and pretending I don’t feel like my chest has been scooped out with a rusty, jagged spoon.
We’re at Civico, the tiny Italian place in Little Italy with the copper bar and the bread that ruins you for all other bread.
Our table is by the window. The sun is going down over the harbor — golden hour, the light doing that thing it does in San Diego where everything looks like a filter.
I watch a couple walk past on the sidewalk, his arm around her waist, and I think: Do they have kids?
Do they get to have kids? Do they wake up every morning and just — have them?
“How late was I this time?” I say, mostly to my wine. “Six days. Six days of thinking maybe, maybe, maybe and peeing on sticks and bargaining with God and the universe and my own ovaries. And then — blood. In the shower. Like a punch line.”
Nadia’s thumb rubs the back of my hand. She doesn’t say it’ll happen or just relax or have you tried acupuncture, and that’s why she’s my best friend. She’s the only person in my life who doesn’t offer me solutions I didn’t ask for.
“The worst part?” I pull my hand back and wrap it around my glass because I need something to hold.
“I can’t even be properly sad anymore. It’s like — the grief has a half-life.
The first year, every negative test destroyed me.
Now it’s just... expected. I’m not devastated.
I’m resigned. And that scares me more than the crying ever did. ”
“That’s not resignation,” Nadia says. “That’s exhaustion. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Yeah. Resigned people stop trying. You made an appointment with Dr. Anand last week.”
I pick at the label on the wine bottle. A corner of it peels away, soggy.
“She wants me to see a fertility specialist.”
Nadia’s eyebrows go up. “And?”
“And nothing. I told her I’d think about it.” I drain the last of my wine and signal the waiter for another. “Mark doesn’t even know I went. I told him it was a checkup.”
“Why?”
Because he flinches. Because every time I bring up a doctor, a test, a next step, I watch something in his face become shielded — a flicker of patience assembling behind his eyes, like he’s putting on a costume.
Because I’m terrified that if I push too hard, if I turn our marriage into a fertility project, he’ll start to resent me.
And I can survive another negative test, but I cannot survive my husband looking at me like I’m a problem he’s tired of trying to solve.
I don’t say any of that.
“I just don’t want to put him through more,” I say.
Nadia gives me a look I know well. It’s the look that means I’m about to say something you won’t like, and I’m saying it anyway because I love you.
“Elena. You’re not putting him through anything. You’re trying to have a baby with your husband. That’s a thing married people do. Together.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because you’re sitting here talking about his feelings about your body like you need his permission to investigate it.”
The waiter arrives with my second glass. I take it and drink immediately, which probably proves whatever point Nadia is making, but I don’t care.
“I’m not saying don’t protect the relationship,” she says, leaning forward. “I’m saying don’t protect it at the expense of yourself. You want a baby. You’ve wanted a baby since before Mark existed. And you deserve answers — real ones, not unexplained infertility and a shrug.”
She pulls out her phone and scrolls through her contacts.
“My sister went through something similar. You know this. Two years, nothing, and every doctor said the same thing — everything looks normal, just keep trying. She was losing her mind.”
“I remember.”
“She found this new OB-GYN. Dr. Lena Martin. She’s at San Diego Women’s Health, over by Scripps. She did a full workup — and I mean full, not the standard bloodwork-and-a-pat-on-the-head. Hormones, imaging, the whole thing. Found the issue in two weeks.”
“What was it?”
“Doesn’t matter — the point is, someone finally looked properly. And Mia’s pregnant now. Twenty-two weeks.”
I stare at her. “Mia’s pregnant?”
“I wanted to tell you in person.” She watches my face carefully. “Are you okay?”
I’m happy for Mia. I am. But the feeling underneath the happiness is something uglier and more honest — a hot, shameful jealousy that I can taste in my throat like bile. Everyone gets this but me. Everyone’s body works but mine.
“I’m thrilled,” I say, and I mostly mean it. “Send me the name.”
Nadia texts it to me. The buzz of my phone on the table sounds like a starting gun.
“One more try,” I say. “One more doctor. And if she tells me the same thing — unexplained, keep trying, good luck — then I’m done. I’m done torturing myself.”
“She won’t.” Nadia lifts her spritz. “She’s the real deal.”
I tap my glass against hers and drink and think: One more try. Like I haven’t said that to myself every month for three years. Like the hope isn’t a bruise I keep pressing just to see if it still hurts.
It never stops hurting.
Mark left for Portland at four.
Some vendor emergency, something about a delayed shipment and a client dinner he couldn’t reschedule. He kissed me at the front door — quick, distracted, already reaching for his keys. “I’ll be back tomorrow night. I made your smoothie for the morning, and put it in the fridge. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
I stood in the doorway and watched his taillights shrink down the driveway and disappear past the hedgerow, and then I was alone in a house that suddenly felt like it had too many rooms.
Now it’s eleven-thirty and I’m in bed with the iPad propped against my knees, and I am doing the thing I swore I’d stop doing.
The Pinterest board is called Someday. I made it four years ago, after the first negative pregnancy test, when I still thought someday was a when and not an if.
It has three hundred and twelve pins. Yellow nursery walls.
A crib with a scalloped canopy. Tiny knit booties in cream and sage.
A mobile with felt animals — a fox, a rabbit, an owl — that costs ninety dollars from an Etsy shop in Vermont.
Onesies printed with Hello, I’m New Here and Worth the Wait.
A rocking chair by a window that looks out at trees.
I scroll through it the way some women scroll through photos of an ex. Slowly. Deliberately. Picking at a wound that never quite scabs over.
There’s a new pin at the top — I saved it two weeks ago.
A nursery with pale yellow walls and white trim, sunlight falling across a crib, a stuffed rabbit propped in the corner.
It looks like the room I’ve been building in my head since I was twenty-three years old.
The room I can see so clearly I could walk through it with my eyes closed — the feel of the carpet under my feet, the soft click of the mobile turning, the smell of baby powder and clean cotton.
Isabella’s room.
A cramp seizes my lower belly — low, deep, mean.
I hiss through my teeth and curl onto my side, pulling my knees up.
The iPad slides against the sheets. The heating pad is downstairs and I don’t want to move, so I press my palm flat against my stomach and breathe through it the way Dr. Anand taught me — slow inhale, hold, slow exhale.
Another cramp. Sharper. My uterus wringing itself out like a fist.
Good, my body says. We’re cleaning house. No baby this month. No baby any month. Pain is your consolation prize.
I press my face into the pillow and feel the anger come — not the sad, defeated kind I wear in front of Nadia, but the real thing. Hot. Vicious. The kind that has teeth.
Because I have done everything right. I track my cycle like a stockbroker tracks the Dow.
I eat clean, exercise, take the prenatal vitamins, skip the extra glass of wine, sleep eight hours, manage my stress.
I have sex with my husband three or four times a week — good sex, regular sex, timed sex during my fertile window, which is exactly as romantic as it sounds and Mark never once complains.
I do everything the books and the blogs and the doctors and the apps tell me to do, and every single month my body sends back the same answer: No.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. The bedroom is dark except for the iPad glow — blue-white, the color of a hospital waiting room. Mark’s side of the bed is flat and cold. The house is so quiet I can hear the refrigerator humming from downstairs.
I pick up the iPad again. Scroll past the nursery pins to a photo I saved months ago and keep coming back to — a woman holding a newborn against her bare chest, the baby’s face pressed to her collarbone, both of them skin-to-skin in a hospital bed.
The woman’s eyes are closed. She looks wrecked — sweaty, exhausted, her hair plastered to her forehead — and she also looks like the happiest person who has ever lived.
My throat closes.
I want that. I want that so badly I can feel it in my teeth, in the marrow of my bones, in the empty space between my hips where a baby is supposed to grow and won’t.
I want to feel a kick. I want to waddle.
I want swollen ankles and heartburn and a birth plan I’ll throw out the window.
I want Mark to cut the cord and cry and hold our daughter and call her Isabella and look at me like I gave him the world.
I want my body to do the one thing it was designed to do, and it won’t.
Another cramp rips through me and I curl tighter, iPad digging into my ribs.
The Pinterest board glows on the screen — all those yellow rooms, all those tiny shoes, all that someday — and I hate it.
I hate the hope of it. I hate that I can’t stop looking.
I hate that every woman in every photo got the thing I can’t have and probably didn’t even have to try.
I close the app. Put the iPad face-down on the nightstand. Pull the covers up to my chin and lie in the dark in my empty bed in my too-big house and listen to the silence press against the windows and feel my body cramp and bleed and fail me, again, again, again.
My phone lights up on the nightstand. Mark.
Mark: Just got to the hotel. Miss you already. Sleep well beautiful ??
I stare at the message. The green heart. The same one he always uses.
Miss you, I type back. Come home soon.
I put the phone down. Press my hand to my stomach. Feel the warmth of my own skin and the dull, rhythmic ache underneath — my body doing the opposite of what I want, the opposite of what I’m asking for, and I don’t understand why.
I close my eyes and try to sleep and fail at that too.