I stared at him—at the anguish carved into his features, at the report trembling in his hands.
My phone screen was still glowing with the comment I'd just posted.
Coincidence, I told myself. It has to be.
Edward and I had been together for nine years. Four years of dating, five years of marriage. Nine years of him anticipating my every need, sheltering me from every storm.
But the year we married, he was diagnosed with severe oligospermia. Our chances of conceiving naturally were almost nonexistent.
His mother had collapsed on the spot. The Abbott line had been single-heir for three generations—it couldn't end with her son.
Edward's hair turned white overnight. Literally. I watched it happen.
After that, we began our long, desperate journey toward a child.
As chief of OB-GYN, he threw everything he had at the problem. Experimental treatments. Bitter herbal concoctions that made him gag with every swallow. Acupuncture sessions so frequent that his back became a roadmap of needle marks, not an inch of skin left untouched.
Every failed sperm retrieval, he'd look at me with red-rimmed eyes and whisper, "I'm sorry."