Page 12 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

Then he was gone.

It took me a while to feel it. The deep cuts never land right away. The affair was a wound with edges I could find. This one had none.

I waited for the anger. I made myself picture the tilt of his head, the small sorry smile, that's good, actually. I tried to want to scream. The rage flickered somewhere far down and went out like a match held in the rain.

I get to have a family now.

I was the one who finally booked the fertility clinic. We both went for testing, but I couldn't make myself go back for the results. So Brad went without me. He came home that afternoon, sat at the kitchen table, took off his glasses, and told me with no softness: The results came back. It's you, Lacey. You're infertile.

Something gave way inside me and didn't stop giving way. I sat staring at the table grain while the whole future I'd been quietly building came apart between one breath and the next. The small hands. The bedtime stories. The crayon drawings held up sticky and proud. Gone, all of it.

He stayed. That is the part I have never been able to explain to anyone who has asked why I didn't leave him years before he left me. He stayed. My mother had walked out of our house and not left me a sentence, and here was a man who, at the moment I'd just been told I was worth the least I would ever be worth, did not get up and go. It wasn't love. Some part of me knew that.

I couldn't cry. I couldn't scream. My heart was going too fast and the rest of me had gone cold and far away, and one phrase kept circling with nowhere to land. Never going to happen with you.

I reached for the phone. I needed a voice. I needed to not be the only person on earth who knew.

"Hi, Lacey. What's up, doll?"

8 - COLD MEDICINE

Lacey

I sat on the couch in the dark with my phone to my ear. Whiskers watched me from the armchair.

It took me a while to get the words out. Janice waited, and somewhere in the waiting she understood.

The concern in her voice was what broke me. I was crying before I knew I had started.

"Hang on, girl. I'm coming. Fifteen minutes."

Behind her, low, a man's voice.

"Janice, it's okay," I managed. "You're busy."

She made a sound like I had said something stupid. "There is nobody and nothing more important than you right now. Sit tight."

Fifteen minutes later she let herself in after one short knock.

"Don't get up. I brought the medicine."

I heard her moving around the kitchen, and then she was beside me with an arm around my shoulders, a glass of wine in my hand and a bowl of rocky road on the table.

I tried to laugh. It came out wrong. "I can't eat, Janice."

"Doesn't matter if it melts." Her voice was softer than I had ever heard it. "Drink some wine. Talk to me."

So I told her. The cat cam, the two girls, the couch. Brad. Most of it.

But I did not tell her the rest. I could barely bring myself to think of it.

Then she got angry. Really angry, the way I could not. She called him a piece of shit and meant it. She said something about driving to wherever he ended up and reminding him in person what he had done, her hands tight on my shoulders. All the fury I should have felt and could not reach, she carried it for me. I watched her do it like it was happening behind glass.

I get to have a family now.

The rocky road went to soup on the table. Janice nudged me, gentler now. "You going to be okay on your own? I can stay. Or you come to mine."

I almost said yes. I did not want to sleep alone in this house, or wake up in it. But I knew how it would go, tonight and then tomorrow and then the night after that, and I knew what I would let it become.