Emily and I had been married for five years.
People used to describe us as steady.
That was the word everyone liked.
Steady.
Not fiery, not noisy, not dramatic.
Steady sounded respectable.
It sounded like two people who had learned how to keep rent paid and dinner on the table.
For a while, maybe that was true.
Emily was kind in ways I did not fully understand until the apartment no longer had them.
She brewed coffee before I woke up.
She placed clean socks on my side of the bed after the dryer finished.
She always asked, “Have you eaten?” as though food could mend whatever the day had damaged.
When we first married, we talked about a small house with a driveway.
Not a large house.
Just enough for a porch chair, a mailbox with our last name, and a backyard where a child could leave plastic toys in the grass.
We wanted children.
That hope changed everything.
Then it destroyed us.
The first miscarriage came after weeks of careful happiness.
Emily had bought a tiny pair of yellow socks and hidden them in the top drawer of the dresser because she said buying baby things too soon felt like tempting fate.
After the hospital confirmed the loss, she held those socks in both hands for nearly an hour.
She did not sob loudly.
Emily never did anything loudly.
She simply sat on the bathroom floor and pressed the socks against her chest as if they were the only evidence that she had not invented the future.
The second miscarriage happened the next year.
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