The second year, I started tracking everything.
I had an app on my phone. I had a thermometer by the bed. I had ovulation strips in the bathroom cabinet, lined up like little soldiers. I knew my cycle better than I knew my own phone number.
“Tonight,” I’d text Ben at work. Just that one word.
He’d send back a heart. Always a heart.
Every month, I’d sit on the edge of the bathtub with a test in my hand, and every month there would be one line. Just one. I started to hate that line. I dreamed about it. One stubborn pink stripe, mocking me.
The third year, I went to see a doctor.
Dr. Mendez was a kind woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She ran test after test. Blood work. Ultrasounds. A procedure where they pushed dye through my fallopian tubes to see if they were blocked. Nobody tells you how much that hurts. I gripped the edge of the table and stared at a poster of a sunset on the ceiling and tried not to scream.
