I drove through the neon-soaked Miami night like a madman, my hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles turned white. Lucy’s text message flashed in my mind over and over. A positive pregnancy test. For eight years, I had made her feel broken. I had cast her aside, weaponizing her silent grief, convincing myself—and her—that she was the defective one.
When I reached our house, the lights were off. The silence that welcomed me wasn’t the peaceful quiet of a sleeping home; it was the absolute stillness of an empty tomb.
I ran straight to the master bedroom and yanked open the nightstand drawer. Resting on top of old receipts was a thick, cream-colored envelope with my name written in Lucy’s elegant, precise handwriting.
My hands shook so badly I tore the paper open. Inside were two documents.
The first was a medical report dated three years ago. It was a fertility evaluation from a clinic we had both visited, but the results had been mailed directly to her. I skipped past the dense medical jargon until my eyes hit the bolded conclusion at the bottom:
