I stared at the screen until the light dimmed and went black. My reflection looked back at me, pale and haunted. Two years of therapy, a new apartment in a city where no one knew my name, and a hard-won sense of peace—all threatened by three words: “Elliot’s new wife.”
I didn’t even know he had remarried. Then again, I had blocked him on everything the day the ink dried on the divorce papers. I took a deep breath, my thumb hovering over the “Block” button. I should use it. I should protect my peace. But the phrase “not by choice”—the ghost of the children we never had—echoed in my head.
I typed back: “What is the question?”
The reply came instantly, as if she had been sitting there, staring at the three bouncing dots of my typing bubble.
“Did he ever tell you about the cellar in the old summer house? The one in Maine?”
My stomach didn’t just drop; it felt like it vanished. Elliot and I had spent every August at his family’s cabin in Maine. It was a rustic, beautiful place where we’d tried, unsuccessfully, to conceive for five years. I remembered the cellar—a damp, dirt-floored space used only for the water heater and old lawn furniture.
“Yes,” I replied. “Why?”
“I found a suitcase,” she wrote. “Tucked behind a false wall in the foundation. It has your name on it, Sarah. But it’s filled with medical records. Specifically, records regarding your fertility treatments.”
I frowned. “That’s impossible. Elliot told me the clinic lost those files in a server crash during our final year. That’s why we couldn’t transfer to the new specialist.”
There was a long pause. When the message finally appeared, it was a photo. It was a scanned document from ten years ago. It was a lab report, but it wasn’t mine. It was Elliot’s.
I zoomed in. The results were clear. Elliot was sterile. He had known since before we were even married.
The room began to spin. For five years, I had endured invasive surgeries, painful hormone injections, and the soul-crushing guilt of thinking my body was “broken.” Every time a test came back negative, Elliot would hold me while I cried, whispering that it was “just bad luck” and that we’d try again. He had watched me wither away under the weight of a failure that wasn’t mine.
“There’s more,” she messaged. “I’m pregnant, Sarah. When I told him, he didn’t look happy. He looked… terrified. He told me I must be mistaken. He tried to give me ‘vitamins’ last night. I didn’t take them. I’m at a hotel now.”
The “one question” she needed to ask wasn’t about the cellar. It was the question she was too afraid to voice until she knew the truth about his past.
“Sarah,” the final message read. “Is he a good man who made a mistake because he loved you too much to lose you… or do I need to run and never look back?”
I looked at the fertility report on my screen. I thought about the thousands of dollars spent, the physical scars on my abdomen, and the way he had let me believe I was the reason we weren’t a family. He hadn’t lied out of love. He had lied to keep me small, dependent, and focused on a problem only he could solve.
I began to type. My hands weren’t shaking anymore.
“He isn’t a good man,” I wrote. “He is a collector of lives. He kept those records because he liked knowing he had fooled me. Don’t go back for your things. Don’t tell him where you are. I’m sending you the address of the lawyer who handled my divorce. She knows exactly what he’s capable of.”
I never heard from her again, but I didn’t need to. A few months ago, I saw a small announcement in a Maine local paper. A property sale: the summer house. And a month after that, a legal notice regarding a name change for a newborn baby boy.
The last name wasn’t Elliot’s.
I closed the laptop and looked out at my garden. It was blooming. For the first time in a decade, I wasn’t waiting for something to grow inside me to feel whole. I was already there.
