The Wife He Cheated on with Her Sister (Her Marriage in Crisis #78)

1. Carrie

— ? —

Carrie

The fertility clinic smells of hand sanitizer and crushed dreams.

I’ve been coming here for two years now, so I know the smell well.

I know the pattern on the ceiling tiles above exam table three, the one Dr. Hollis always puts me in.

I know the exact shade of mauve they painted the walls, someone’s idea of “soothing,” probably the same person who thought it was a good idea to hang framed prints of mother-and-baby animals in a place where women come to find out why their bodies won’t do the one thing bodies are supposedly designed to do.

Today there’s a new print. A kangaroo with a joey peeking out of her pouch. I stare at it while I wait, my feet dangling off the exam table, the paper crinkling every time I shift my weight.

I’m thirty-six years old. I’ve been trying to have a baby since I was thirty.

Six years of temperature charts and ovulation kits and legs propped up on pillows afterward, on the theory that gravity might do what medicine could not.

Four rounds of IUI. Two rounds of IVF. More needles than I can count, more hormones than any one body should have to hold.

Ulises stopped coming to these appointments a year ago.

“I can’t keep watching you fall apart,” he said.

He was never the one on the table. He was never the one getting poked and prodded and told to “stay positive” while my body failed me over and over again.

He’d refused testing himself from the very beginning.

Nothing wrong with me, he always said. So in six years, the only body anyone ever examined was mine. But he was the one who couldn’t watch.

The door opens. Dr. Hollis walks in with that look on his face, the one I’ve learned to dread. It’s not the “good news” face. It’s not even the “let’s discuss our options” face. It’s the look he saves for the very end, right before he takes away the last thing you were holding onto.

“Carrie.” He sits down on his little rolling stool, clipboard in hand. He doesn’t meet my eyes. “Thank you for coming in.”

“You said you had my results.” My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. Maybe I’m getting better at this. Or maybe I’ve just run out of ways to hope.

“I do.” He flips through some papers, even though I’m pretty sure he’s already memorized what they say. “The last embryo transfer... I’m sorry, but it didn’t take.”

I nod. I already knew that part. The pregnancy test I took at home three days ago had one line, not two. One single, solitary, soul-crushing line.

“However, I wanted to discuss your results from the most recent hormone panel and egg retrieval.” He finally looks at me, and what’s in his eyes is worse than disappointment. It’s finality. “Carrie, at your age, we have to be realistic about what’s possible.”

At your age.

There it is. The phrase I’ve been running from for years.

“What do you mean, realistic?” I ask, even though I don’t want to know. Even though I can feel the answer coming, and there’s no stepping off the tracks in time.

“Your AMH has come down with age, and I won’t pretend the numbers are good.” He pauses, choosing his words carefully. “But after six years, Carrie, the honest truth is we’ve never found a clear reason it hasn’t worked. Some of these cases we just can’t explain.”

The room tilts a little. I grip the edge of the exam table.

“So we try again,” I say. “We do another retrieval. We-”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.” His voice is gentle, which somehow makes it worse. “The emotional and physical toll of these treatments is significant. And given your current numbers, the likelihood of success is... very low.”

“How low?”

“Less than five percent.”

Five percent. That’s not a chance. That’s a statistical anomaly. That’s a rounding error.

“So what are you saying?” My voice cracks, and I hate it. I hate that I’m cracking in front of him, in this sterile room with its stupid kangaroo print. “That I should just give up?”

“I’m saying that sometimes the kindest thing we can do for ourselves is accept when a door has closed.” He reaches out, maybe to pat my hand, then thinks better of it. “There are other options. Adoption. Surrogacy. A fulfilling life without children. Many women.”

“I’ve wanted to be a mother since I was six years old.

” The words come out harder than I mean them to, but I can’t stop them.

“I used to carry around a baby doll everywhere I went. I named her Sophie. I fed her pretend bottles and changed her pretend diapers and told her I’d always take care of her.

I have wanted this my entire life. And you’re telling me to just... accept that a door has closed?”

Dr. Hollis’s expression twists. Pity, maybe. Or maybe he’s just tired of having this conversation with women my age.

“I’m telling you we’ve reached the end of what these treatments can do,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry, Carrie. I truly am.”

I don’t remember getting dressed. I don’t remember walking out of the exam room, past the receptionist who calls out “Same time next month?” past the waiting room full of women clutching their purses to their chests.

I don’t remember taking the elevator down to the parking garage or walking to my car or unlocking the door.

But I remember what happens when I finally sit down behind the wheel.

I press my forehead against the steering wheel, and I break.

The sob that comes out of me doesn’t sound human.

It’s the sound of an animal dying, of a body torn open from the inside.

My whole body shakes with it, tears streaming down my face, snot running from my nose, and I don’t even care.

I don’t care if someone walks by and sees me.

I don’t care if I look pathetic. I don’t care about anything except this gaping hole in my chest where my future used to be.

Barren.

The word floats up from somewhere deep, somewhere ugly. It’s an old word, a biblical word. A word for cursed women, for failed women, for women whose bodies betrayed them.

Too old. Too late. You waited too long.

But I didn’t wait. I didn’t choose this.

I married Ulises when I was thirty, started trying when I was thirty.

I did everything right. I ate the right foods, took the right vitamins, stood on my head after sex because the internet swore it helped.

I wanted this so badly I could taste it, and my body said no. Over and over again, my body said no.

I cry until my throat is raw and my eyes are swollen and the dashboard clock reads 3:47 p.m., which means I’ve been sitting in this parking garage for almost an hour.

I need to go home. I need to tell Ulises. Maybe he’ll hold me tonight. Maybe he’ll say the right things, the things he used to say when we first started trying: “It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen” and “We’ll get through this together” and “I love you no matter what.”

He hasn’t said those things in a long time. But maybe today, he will.

I wipe my face with my sleeve. Check my reflection in the rearview mirror.

I look wrecked, mascara smeared, eyes red, skin blotchy, but I don’t have any makeup with me to fix it.

I’ll just have to walk home as what I am, a woman who’s been crying in her car for an hour, because that’s exactly the truth of it.

The walk is only fifteen minutes. I leave my car in the garage; I’ll come back for it later.

I need the air. I need the movement. I need to figure out what I’m going to say to my husband when I walk through the door and tell him that the last door has closed, that there won’t be a baby, that the thing I’ve wanted my whole life is never going to happen.

The spring air is warm. Cherry blossoms drift across the sidewalk, pink and obscene, and I want to scream at them for being so beautiful on the worst day of my life. A mother pushes a stroller past me, her baby sleeping peacefully inside, and I have to look away before I start crying again.

I practice what I’ll say as I walk.

The treatment didn’t work. But we have options. We could adopt. We could try surrogacy. We could...

Who am I kidding? Ulises doesn’t want to adopt.

He made that clear two years ago, when I first brought it up.

“I want my own child,” he said. “My own blood. What’s the point otherwise?

” And surrogacy? With his money, we could afford it, but he’d never agree.

He barely agreed to the IVF, and only because I cried for three days straight.

I turn onto our street. Our house sits at the end of the block, a beautiful three-story brownstone that Ulises’s grandmother signed over to him. It’s too big for two people. It was supposed to be full of children by now. Instead, it’s full of empty rooms I try not to think about too hard.

Ulises’s car is in the driveway.

I stop walking. He’s supposed to be at work until six. He never comes home early, not for anything.

Maybe he knew. Maybe he knew today was the day they’d give me my results, and he wanted to be here when I got home. Maybe, for once, he’s going to be the husband I need him to be.

A knot loosens in my chest. Hope, maybe. Or just desperate wishful thinking.

I walk up the front steps. Unlock the door.

And that’s when I see it.

A red thong, crumpled on the living room floor. Lace. Expensive. Nothing I’ve worn since before the hormone treatments made me bloated and tired and not remotely in the mood.

Not mine.

My hand freezes on the doorknob.