Chapter 2

The memory of the clinic was so vivid it felt like it happened yesterday. The smell of antiseptic, the crinkle of the paper on the examination table, the cheerful, detached voice of the doctor explaining the procedure. Sarah held my hand the whole time.

"Are you sure about this, Ethan?" she had asked, her eyes wide with what I thought was concern for me. "We can just be careful."

"I'm sure," I had told her, squeezing her hand. "I want you to have the life you want. No stress, no accidents. Just us."

The life she wanted. It was a bitter joke.

A few years later, when we were in our thirties and friends started having kids, a flicker of doubt entered my mind. A passing thought about what it might be like. I mentioned it to her once, just once. A week later, she came to me with a somber face and a piece of paper. A lab report.

"Ethan, honey," she had said, her voice thick with fake sympathy. "I went for a check-up. They said... they said it would be very difficult for me to conceive. My egg count is extremely low."

She cried in my arms. I held her, comforted her, and felt a surge of protectiveness. I told her it didn't matter. It was a sign. We were meant to be just us. I pushed away my own fleeting desire for a child, burying it deep to protect her from pain.

All of it was a lie. A calculated, cruel performance. The infertility diagnosis was a prop, just like her love.

I found out because of a loose thread. A monthly payment of five thousand dollars to a property management company in a town an hour away. It had been going on for ten years. When I asked her about it, she waved it off as a "charitable donation for a women's shelter." But the company name didn't sound like a charity.

So I dug. It wasn't hard. A quick search of public records linked the property to her parents. They hadn't retired to Florida; they' d moved to that quiet suburban town. A private investigator cost me a few thousand dollars, but the report he delivered was priceless in its devastation.

Photos. Hundreds of them. Sarah at a park, pushing two identical little boys on swings. Sarah and Liam and the twins at a birthday party, a cake with "Happy 5th Birthday Luke & Ben!" written in blue frosting. Her parents beaming in the background. They looked like the perfect, happy family. And I was the one paying for the house they were living this lie in.

I was a fool. A twenty-year-long joke. The loyal, dedicated husband. The man who sacrificed his own chance at fatherhood for a woman who was building another family behind his back. The ground had fallen out from under me, and I was in free fall.

"I'm sorry," Sarah said now, back in our kitchen, her voice trying for contrition. It didn't reach her eyes. "I never meant to hurt you."

"You didn't mean to hurt me?" I repeated, my voice laced with venom. "You orchestrate a decade-long lie, you have children with another man while I think we're a team, and you didn't mean to hurt me? What did you think would happen, Sarah?"

"I don't know," she said, her voice rising. "I was confused! I wanted a child, and you didn't, and Liam... Liam was there."

"So you cheated on me." It was the first time I'd said the word out loud. It tasted like ash.

She had the gall to look offended. "It wasn't like that. It was just one time."

"One time?" I laughed, a raw, painful sound. "One time that resulted in a decade of lies and two children? Do you hear yourself? You're not sorry you did it. You're just sorry I found out."

She stared at me, her jaw set. The mask of remorse was gone, replaced by a chilling defiance. She wasn't fighting for our marriage. She was defending her choices. And in that moment, I knew the man she married, the Ethan Miller who loved her unconditionally, was dead. He died tonight, in this cold, white kitchen, surrounded by the wreckage of a life built on her deception.