The doctor continued carefully.
“Based on the records, you were pregnant five times.”
I shook my head.
“Luke told me I wasn’t.”
“He was wrong.”
“No.”
“He wasn’t wrong by accident.”
The room went silent.
The doctor lowered her voice.
“The records indicate that every one of those pregnancies was male.”
My fingers curled around the blanket.
Sons.
The children Luke had screamed about.
The children he had blamed me for not giving him.
The children he claimed my body could never carry.
All of them had been there.
Inside me.
I started crying.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
The tears simply came.
I remembered one pregnancy in particular.
I had been eleven weeks along.
Luke had come home angry after drinking.
He had accused me of hiding money.
When I told him I was pregnant, he had stared at me for several seconds.
Then he said,
“If it’s another girl, I’ll make sure you never get pregnant again.”
