I can’t have children. When we first started trying, my husband Ethan held me through every negative pregnancy test. He would pull me close, press his lips to my forehead, and say we would try again, like it was the most natural thing in the world, like hope was something you could just keep restocking on the shelf no matter how many times it ran out.
After the fourth failed treatment, something shifted between us. We stopped talking about baby names. The nursery we had spent a whole Sunday afternoon planning together, picking out colors and debating whether the crib should face the window, quietly became a storage room again.
Neither of us acknowledged it. We just started putting boxes in there, and the boxes stayed, and eventually the room was just where we kept things we didn’t know what to do with. The subject of children became something we circled around without touching, like a bruise you learn to protect without thinking about it consciously.
I started noticing the way Ethan watched families in restaurants, that involuntary second of staring before he caught himself and looked away. He never said anything about it. Neither did I.
That was the real problem, in the end. All the things we chose not to say out loud because saying them felt like admitting something we weren’t ready to admit. One evening after another doctor’s appointment, I sat on the edge of the bed and said what I had been thinking for weeks.
“Maybe we should stop trying.”
Ethan stood by the window with his back to me. “I don’t want to give up on having a child.”
A few weeks later he came home with a thick stack of documents tucked under his arm and something bright in his expression that I hadn’t seen in months. He had been researching surrogacy.
He laid everything out on the kitchen table, all the research, all the options, the process spelled out step by step, and I sat there looking at him across the table and thought maybe we were actually going to be okay. Maybe this was the path that had been waiting for us all along. He handled the logistics from there.
The agency, the lawyers, the interviews. He threw himself into it with an organizational focus I had always admired in him, the way he could take something enormous and complicated and break it down into manageable parts until it stopped being terrifying. Eventually he introduced me to Claire.
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