I couldn’t answer. My daughter was still crying. I rocked her, and I shushed her, and I told her it was okay, Mama was here, Mama had her.
I didn’t know yet how much of a lie that was. Nothing was okay.
But to understand why those words broke me the way they did, you have to understand the six years before them.
The first year, we laughed about it.
“It takes time,” Ben said, the first month the test came back negative. We were sitting on the edge of the bathtub in our little rented apartment, and he took the stick out of my hand and tossed it in the trash like it was nothing. “We’ve got all the time in the world, Claire.”
I was twenty-eight. He was thirty. We had been married for a year. He was right. We had time.
So we practiced. That was his word for it, with a wink. We practiced a lot. We bought a house with a backyard and a second bedroom painted a soft gray that we called “the office,” even though we both knew what it was really waiting to be.
