Ben didn’t look away. I’ll give him that. He kept looking at me, even though I could see it was killing him.
“I took Clomid for eight months,” I said. “It made me sick. It made me cry for no reason. I gained twelve pounds and I hated my body. I had a dye pushed through my tubes, and I lay on that table and I thought it was a punishment. I thought God was punishing me for something. I stood in front of the mirror and asked myself what was wrong with me.”
“I remember,” he whispered.
“And I apologized to you.” My voice cracked wide open. “I apologized to you, Ben. I held you in that bathroom and said I was sorry I couldn’t give you a baby. And you let me. You let me say it. And you said nothing.”
He bent forward in the armchair like I’d hit him.
“Every time you said it,” he said into his hands, “I wanted to die.”
“But you didn’t tell me.”
“No. I didn’t tell you.”
My dad shifted in the doorway. He hadn’t said a word through any of this. Now he spoke.
“Why’d you come here today, son?”
Ben looked up at him. He wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“After the hospital, I went home, and I sat in the dark for two days,” Ben said. “I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. Claire’s photo came. The one of Evie’s hand.” His voice wavered. “I must have looked at it a thousand times. And then yesterday, after Claire came for her things, after I watched her through the window and didn’t open the door, Mom came over. And she found me. And I said, I need to know. I need to know for sure.”
