I should have known something was wrong the moment I saw the velvet box.
It was dark blue, the color of a bruise, and Susan was carrying it in both hands like it was something precious. She walked into the back room of Marco’s with her chin up and her lipstick fresh, smiling at everyone, and when she got to me, she held it out.
“Happy birthday, Emily,” she said. “I had this made especially for you.”
Thirty-five years old. A room full of people I loved. Candles on the table, a bottle of red wine already half gone, my husband’s hand resting warm on my back.
And for one stupid, hopeful second, I thought my mother-in-law was finally trying to make peace.
Everyone leaned closer.
I remember my fingers on the little gold clasp. I remember Thomas shifting in his chair. I remember my best friend Tara whispering, “Ooh, jewelry,” and my father-in-law, Matthew, reaching for the bread basket without looking up.
I remember thinking, Maybe this is her way of saying sorry.
Then I opened the lid.
But I need to go back first. Because you can’t understand what happened in that room, what Matthew did, or why Susan screamed the way she did, unless you know what the four years before it looked like.
Thomas and I got married when I was thirty. We waited one year, because we wanted to be “just us” for a little while. We took a trip to Portugal. We painted our tiny house a color called Sea Glass that turned out to look like a hospital hallway, and we laughed about it for months.
Then we started trying.
The first six months, it was fun. Honestly. We’d joke about it. Thomas would text me at work: Ovulation tonight? Should I buy candles? And I’d text back: Buy pizza. Candles are for amateurs.
After a year, it wasn’t funny anymore.
After two, there were tests. Blood work. An ultrasound where a woman with cold hands pressed a wand against my stomach and didn’t say anything for a very long time. Then a doctor’s office with a fake ficus in the corner and a word I had to look up when I got home.
Then there were the injections.
If you’ve never done IVF, I don’t know how to explain it except like this: every night for weeks, Thomas stood in our bathroom with a needle, and I sat on the edge of the tub with my shirt pulled up, and he’d say, “Ready?” and I’d say, “No,” and he’d do it anyway, because we had to.
He never got used to it. His hands shook every single time.
“I hate hurting you,” he said once, capping the needle.
“You’re not hurting me,” I said. “The universe is hurting me. You’re just the delivery guy.”
He laughed. Then he sat down on the bathroom floor and put his head against my knee and didn’t say anything for a long time.
The first round failed. We got the phone call on a Tuesday while I was in the grocery store, standing in front of the cereal. The nurse was very kind. I thanked her. I hung up. I bought the cereal. I drove home. I didn’t cry until I was putting the groceries away and saw that I’d bought the wrong kind.
The second round, we got further. Two weeks further. Long enough to see two pink lines. Long enough for Thomas to buy a tiny knit hat at a craft fair and hide it in his sock drawer, where I found it later.
Long enough to hope.
Then I started bleeding at work, in the bathroom on the fourth floor, and a woman from accounting found me sitting on the floor of the handicapped stall and called Thomas for me because I couldn’t hold my phone steady enough to dial.
The specialist’s name was Dr. Okafor. She had gray braids pulled back into a bun, and she didn’t do the thing some doctors do where they look at the chart instead of your face.
She looked right at me.
“Emily,” she said. “I want to be honest with you, because I think you’d rather have honesty than hope that isn’t real.”
Thomas took my hand under the desk.
She explained it slowly. The scarring. The shape of things inside me that I’d never known were the wrong shape. Words like structural and high-risk and not viable. She drew a little diagram on a notepad. I stared at the diagram. It looked like a bad drawing of a pear.
“So what you’re saying,” Thomas said, “is that it’s hard.”
Dr. Okafor looked at him. Then she looked back at me.
“What I’m saying is that carrying a pregnancy to term is almost impossible for you. Not completely. I never say completely. But almost.”
Almost.
I remember nodding. I remember saying, “Okay.” I remember saying, “Thank you for being straight with us.” I remember shaking her hand at the end, like we’d just finished a job interview.
In the car, Thomas didn’t start the engine. We sat in the parking garage with the concrete walls all around us and the smell of oil and old rain.
“Em,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“I’m fine, Thomas. Please just drive.”
He didn’t drive. He reached over and pulled me against him, awkward over the gearshift, and I pressed my face into his jacket, and I made a sound I didn’t know I could make. Something between a scream and a cough. He held on and didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say.
After a while, I sat up and wiped my face with my sleeve.
“What do we tell people?” I asked.
“Whatever you want.”
“Your mom’s going to have a field day.”
He didn’t laugh. He knew I wasn’t really joking.
I stopped going to baby showers after that.
Not all at once. I tried at first. I went to my cousin Nora’s, and I bought a very expensive stroller off the registry because I thought if I spent enough money it would prove I was okay. I sat in a folding chair in her backyard while women passed around onesies with ducks on them and said, “Oh my God, it’s so tiny,” and I smiled until my face hurt.
Then someone started a game where you guessed how big the mother’s belly was with a piece of string, and I got up and went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid and counted the tiles on the floor. Eighty-four. I counted them three times.
After that, I sent gifts instead.
Thomas understood. He never once asked why I was “skipping” things. He’d just quietly handle it. “Emily’s got a work thing,” he’d tell people. Or, “She’s not feeling great.” He covered for me like it was nothing.
His mother, Susan, did not understand.
Or maybe she did. Maybe she understood perfectly. That’s the part I still think about.
Susan knew everything. We told her and Matthew the whole story, right after the appointment with Dr. Okafor, because Thomas said, “They’re family. They should hear it from us, not from somebody else.”
We sat in their living room. Matthew in his brown recliner. Susan on the couch with her legs crossed, her reading glasses pushed up on her head.
Thomas did the talking. I just held a glass of water and looked at the carpet.
When he finished, Matthew said, “Oh, kiddo. I’m so sorry.” He got up and hugged me, which he’d never done before. He smelled like sawdust and aftershave. He was a big, quiet man who’d worked as a carpenter for forty years and had hands like baseball mitts.
Susan didn’t get up.
“Well,” she said. “Have you thought about adoption?”
“Mom,” Thomas said.
“What? It’s a reasonable question.”
“We just found out today.”
“I’m only saying there are options.” She took a sip of her tea. “Some women just aren’t built for it. It’s nobody’s fault.”
Some women just aren’t built for it.
I set my water glass down very carefully on the coaster, so it wouldn’t make a sound.
Matthew cleared his throat. “Susan.”
“What? I’m being supportive.”
That was the first one. After that, they never really stopped.
Thomas’s younger sister, Anna, announced her pregnancy the following spring.
She did it at Easter dinner. She stood up and clinked her glass with a fork and held up a little ultrasound picture, and the whole table erupted. Susan jumped up and screamed and hugged her. Matthew wiped his eyes. Anna’s husband, Greg, grinned like he’d personally invented babies.
I clapped. I smiled. I said, “Anna, that’s amazing.” And I meant it. That’s the thing people don’t understand about infertility. You can be happy for someone and still feel like you’ve been punched.
Anna looked at me across the table. Her face got careful. “Em, I wasn’t sure how to tell you. I didn’t want to…”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.”
Then Susan sat back down, still flushed and glowing, and looked right at me.
“Some women are just luckier than others,” she said.
It got quiet.
Thomas put his fork down. “Mom. Stop.”
“What did I say?”
“You know exactly what you said.”
Susan rolled her eyes and reached for the gravy. “Relax. She knows I don’t mean anything by it. Right, Emily?”
Everyone looked at me.
I could have said something. I could have said, No, Susan, I don’t know that. I could have gotten up and left. Instead, I did what I always did. I smiled and said, “Of course.”
Under the table, Thomas’s knee was pressed against mine so hard it hurt.
In the car on the way home, he was furious.
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Say it’s fine. Let her off the hook.”
“Because it’s Easter, Thomas. Because your sister just announced she’s having a baby, and I didn’t want to be the woman who ruined it by crying over the ham.”
“You wouldn’t have ruined it. She ruined it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
I looked out the window. “What am I supposed to do? She’s your mother.”
“I know she’s my mother,” he said quietly. “That’s why it makes me sick.”
It went on like that for almost two years.
At Anna’s baby shower, which I did go to, because Anna begged me, Susan handed me a stack of plates and said, “Here, you can be on serving duty. You’ll need something to keep you busy.”
When Anna’s son Leo was born, Susan held him up at the hospital and said to the room, “Finally, a grandchild in this family,” and then glanced at me and added, “Well. The first one. We’ll see if there are others.”
At a Fourth of July barbecue, when a neighbor asked me if Thomas and I had kids, Susan answered for me before I could open my mouth. “Oh, no. They have a dog.” She said dog the way you’d say parking ticket.
And every single time, Thomas told her to stop.
And every single time, Susan shrugged. “Relax. She knows I don’t mean anything by it.”
And every single time, Matthew said the same thing.
“That’s just how she is.”
He’d say it to Thomas, quietly, in the kitchen. He’d say it to me once, when he walked me out to the car after the Fourth of July thing and saw my face.
“Don’t take it to heart, kiddo,” he said, standing by the driver’s door with his hands in his pockets. “That’s just how she is. She’s got a sharp tongue. She’s always had one.”
“Does she have a sharp tongue with Anna?” I asked.
He opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
“Does she say things like that to anybody else, Matthew? Or just me?”
He looked down at his shoes. Big, scuffed work boots.
“Drive safe,” he said.
The worst one was Christmas.
Susan and Matthew always hosted. The whole house smelled like cinnamon and pine needles, and there was a train set running around the base of the tree that Matthew had built himself when Thomas was a boy.
That year, Anna was nursing Leo on the couch. Greg was drinking eggnog with too much rum in it. Thomas was on the floor with his old train set, fixing a piece of track that had come loose. And I was in the kitchen, helping Susan with the dishes, because I was always helping Susan with the dishes. It was easier than sitting with everyone else.
Susan poured two glasses of wine and handed me one.
“Here,” she said, and laughed. “At least you never have to give this up for nine months.”
I stood there holding the glass.
She was smiling. It wasn’t even a mean smile. That was the strange part. It was a light smile, easy, like she’d just told a funny little joke about the weather.
I put the wine glass down on the counter. I walked out of the kitchen, got my coat from the hall closet, and went out to the car. It was snowing. I sat in the passenger seat with the door closed and my breath fogging up the windows.
Ten minutes later, Thomas came out. He didn’t have his coat on. There was snow in his hair.
He got in the driver’s seat. He didn’t ask what happened. He’d heard it. Anna had heard it. The whole house had heard it, because Susan never said anything quietly.
“I told her,” he said. His voice was shaking. “I told her if she ever says anything like that to you again, we’re done coming here.”
“What did she say?”
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “She said, ‘Relax. She knows I don’t mean anything by it.’”
“And your dad?”
Thomas looked at the house. Through the big front window, we could see the Christmas tree, the lights blinking. Someone was moving around inside. Matthew, maybe.
“He said, ‘That’s just how she is.’”
We drove home in silence. When we got there, Thomas made me tea and sat with me on the couch until two in the morning. Neither of us turned on the TV. We just sat there, listening to the snow hit the windows.