“I shouldn’t even have taken it,” he answers, eyes still closed. “We’re right in the high season, and my staff needs me. And there’s a lot going on at home, and then there’s choir practice tonight—”
“I always knew you’d look cute in a choir boy outfit.”
He pops one eye open. “Zoe’schoir practice.”
“With Mrs. Hahn still? What is she, a hundred now?”
“And still as scary as ever. I never would’ve had Zoe go through that like I did, but she’s the one who wanted to do it. Honestly, they’re terrible, and I can’t tell what they’re singing half the time, but she loves it.” He scratches his head. “They had practice an hour ago, actually.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because I made the mistake of telling Liz about it, and this morning, I thought about how Zoe might see her there, and I choked.” He rubs his brows. “But I also felt terrible about taking this from Zoe, so I took today off for a beach day.” His gaze moves to his daughter, who’s currently showing Xavier she can stand on one foot over a bucket. “I can’t do it. It probably makes me a shitty dad, but I’m too fucking scared.”
“It makes sense,” I say. “And you’re the opposite of a shitty dad.”
He glances at me. “I’m pretty sure I’m the definition of overbearing.”
“No, you’re not.” I shrug. “You’re… careful with her. With her heart.”
Xavier shrieks as Zoe lays a splat of mud on his back.
“I should probably scold her for that,” Eli says.
“She’s laying down her territory. Leave her be.”
He chuckles beside me.
Besides the kids, a family is set up with an actual tent and barbeque, a baby sleeping in a cot on the ground. Pop music is playing from their portable speakers as two children eat the hotdogs the father just cooked.
“If I’d had to guess, I would’ve said you’d have had children first, out of the two of us.”
A wave of nausea rolls over me. The sweet taste of my Caprisun turns bitter on my tongue, and I feel like spitting into the sand.
Unaware, Eli continues. “I never found you on social media, but when I’d meet your mom in town, I’d ask about you. She told me you were engaged. I was waiting for the day she’d tell me you were expecting.”
He can’t know what his words are doing to me. I can’t fault him. We always did talk about how we wanted kids. I even dreamed for a long time I’d end up having them with him.
I don’t remember a day when becoming a mother wasn’t my dream. I knew I wanted it before I even understood what it truly meant. One day, fingerprint smudges would cover my fridge door. My floors would be covered in toys, strewn across all reachable surfaces, and I’d love the mess and chaos. My nights would be short, and my days would be filled with the kind of love I’d only ever seen in the Grants’ house.
“I…” My mouth feels like I’ve swallowed sand. I’ve had to utter the words only once since I learned the news, and that was to Emily. Sariah knew enough, but not the whole story. I could never bring myself to tell Mom.
“I feel like I just said something I shouldn’t have.”
I don’t want to imagine what I look like. He’s probably thinking that something happened with my fiancé, and it did, but that’s the least of my concerns. It was simply the last handful of dirt thrown onto my grave.
“I can’t have children.”
For a moment, it feels as if the waves have stopped roaring, as if the specks of sand in the hourglass have paused their fall. People say time heals all wounds, and yet every time I so much as think those four words, it’s as though my injury worsens, like the small blood clot has been picked away, only to restart the process anew. It will never get better. How could it?
“God, Cass…” The nickname, coupled with the heat of his gaze on me, almost makes me crumble. He doesn’t offer an apology, no senseless encouragement, and that more than anything is what brings the tears to my eyes. He knows it wouldn't help. There is no silver lining in this. Not when I threaded my entire life around that dream. And only because he knows me so well, even a decade later, can he understand.
That profound recognition is what gets me to say, “I tried to get pregnant naturally for a year before I decided to consult, but even before then, I knew something was wrong. Could feel it in my gut. And after multiple rounds of investigations, I had my answer. Severe endometriosis.”
My periods have always been painful. When I got them for the first time at twelve years old and cried for two days straight, sitting on the floor of the shower under the warm water until my father shouted that I clearly wasn’t the one paying the utility bill, I thought I wouldn’t survive it. I was told menstruating was painful for everyone, and I’d have to get used to it. Eventually, I did, or at least found ways to make them bearable. Hook myself on anti-inflammatories for the duration of it, go to school with heating pads hidden under my shirts, and pretend like twenty-five percent of my life wasn’t composed of intolerable suffering. The endometriosis diagnosis never came up, even when I started having other symptoms, like IBS and painful sex. It should have been obvious to me by the time I realized I couldn’t get pregnant, but I never put two and two together, probably still too fixated on the hope that we’d figure out a simple way to solve the problem.You’ve been having sex wrong. Try this and you’ll have a baby in no time!
“Aren’t there, I don’t know, surgeries for that?”
“I had two already.” It’s still such a widely misunderstood disease, but surgery to remove pieces of misplaced endometrium in the belly is one known way to improve pain and infertility. I saw that surgery as a beacon of hope, but when nothing changed after the first one, I had to take off my rose-colored glasses. We tried another surgery nine months later, and while my periods did get a bit better after that one, I still couldn’t get pregnant. In a sunlit office a year and two rounds of failed IVF later, my gynecologist clasped his hands and told me I should consider other options. “My body doesn’t want me to become a mother.”
