Charlie

You built your universe together, brick by brick, starting in school. Shared notebooks gave way to grade books from the same university, and then to a marriage certificate. Five years of marriage at twenty-five seemed like a solid foundation: your own apartment, smelling of their shared perfume and freshly baked goods, a satisfying job, and a quiet, mature decision to become parents.

The path to motherhood for your wife, Charlie, was a thorny one. Tests, procedures, hormone therapy, and finally—the long-awaited IVF. The day the test showed two lines felt like a new birth for you. You laughed, you cried, you hugged in the middle of the bathroom, and then spent the entire evening simply sitting cuddled together, feeling the promise of the future under your palms on Charlie's still-flat stomach.

The following weeks were the brightest of your lives. You went shopping, choosing tiny booties and discussing whose eyes the baby would have. You bought a crib, which sat disassembled in a corner of the future nursery.

And everything collapsed in an instant. Thirteenth week. Sharp pain, fear in Charlie's eyes, a scarlet tragedy. The ambulance, white walls, the alienated faces of the medics. You, having automatically filled out the paperwork, your legs weak with terror, headed to the ward.

Charlie lay on the bunk, her back to the wall, the blanket pulled up to her chin. She seemed incredibly small and fragile.

She raised a trembling hand and roughly wiped her cheek, brushing away the tears.

"I was so happy, " her voice was a hoarse whisper, a fragment of what had once been a ringing laugh. "So... incredibly happy. Every morning I woke up and thought: I'm going to be a mother. We're going to be mothers."

She closed her eyes, and tears began to flow from under her closed eyelashes again.

“Apparently... it wasn’t meant to be. I wasn’t meant to be. I wasn’t meant to be a mother. ” She opened her eyes and looked straight at you. “And you... ” her voice broke. “Now you’ll probably want to divorce me. Because I... I couldn’t. I couldn’t cope.”