My Husband Let His Mistress Replace Me

The second cycle started on a Thursday.

I didn't count the bruises anymore. There were too many, purple fading into yellow fading into new purple, a whole calendar written on my stomach in needle marks. I mixed the trigger shot in the bathroom because the light was better there, and because if I did it in my room, I might look at the shoebox under the cot and lose the nerve to finish.

By the second retrieval, I couldn't stand up straight in the shower. The water hit my back and I gripped the tile and breathed through my teeth until it passed. Dr. Webb said some cramping was normal. He didn't look up from his chart when he said it. I didn't tell him it felt like something was being wrung out of me, twisted like a wet towel, over and over.

The third cycle was when my clothes stopped fitting.

I noticed it folding laundry — the waistband of my one good skirt gaping at the hip, an inch of space where there hadn't been space before. I stood in front of the small mirror I kept propped against the wall in my room and looked at myself for a long time. My collarbones had sharpened. My skin had gone the color of old paper. I looked like someone who was disappearing on purpose.

I made dinner every night anyway. Roasted chicken, rosemary potatoes, the good bread from the bakery on Lexington that I bought with quarters I'd been saving in an old coffee tin. Nolan came home late most nights and ate standing at the counter, scrolling through his phone, and left half the plate for me to throw away. I didn't mind the waste. I minded the silence more, the way he could stand three feet from me and not see that my hands were shaking on the cutting board, that I had to lean into the counter's edge just to keep from folding in half.

The pain came in waves now. Sharp, then dull, then sharp again, low in my belly, like something clawing its way out. I told myself it was the hormones. The doctor had said cramping was normal. I repeated that to myself the way I used to repeat prayers.

I didn't ask Nolan for money. I would rather have died than ask him for money.

So I found the clinic the way I found everything now — quietly, on my own, with what I could scrape together. A free clinic in the Bronx, two trains and a long walk from the penthouse, the kind of place with taped-together chairs and a receptionist who called out names like she was calling out numbers at a butcher counter. I paid nothing. I waited four hours. I read the same water-stained poster about flu shots eleven times.

The doctor who saw me was young, tired-looking, with kind eyes that made it worse somehow. She pressed on my abdomen and I flinched, and she didn't say anything right away, and that silence told me more than words could have.

"Mrs. Andrews," she said — I'd used his name, out of habit, out of some old reflex I couldn't kill — "I want to run some imaging. Today, if you can wait."

I waited.

The results came back on a sheet of paper that looked too plain, too ordinary, for what it said. Stage III ovarian cancer. The words sat there in flat black type like they belonged to someone else's life. The doctor explained it slowly, gently, the way you'd explain something to a child you didn't want to frighten. Repeated hormonal stimulation — multiple aggressive IVF cycles in rapid succession — had almost certainly accelerated the growth. She said aggressive. She said accelerated. She said the tumor had likely been growing quietly for a long time, and the treatments had lit a match under it.

She told me I needed surgery immediately. A hundred thousand dollars, maybe more, depending on complications. Then chemotherapy. Without it, she said — and here her voice dropped, careful, clinical — without it, I was looking at months. Not years.

I nodded like she'd told me the weather.

I sat in the clinic bathroom afterward for a long time. The lock on the door was broken, so I held it shut with my foot against the base while I read the paperwork twice, three times, my eyes tracing the same lines until the letters blurred and reformed and blurred again. Stage III. Months. I thought about the shoebox of letters under my cot. I thought about the prayer bracelets, the ones I bought every year without fail, the ones asking God to keep him safe when I couldn't even keep myself alive.

I folded the papers into quarters, then eighths, until they fit in my coat pocket like something small and unimportant. Then I washed my face with cold water, straightened my collar in the cracked mirror, and walked out past the receptionist who didn't look up.

On the subway home, I watched the tunnel lights strobe past the window and thought about how strange it was — that I had spent three years learning how to disappear quietly, and now my own body was just finishing the job.

I told no one. Not my mother, three thousand miles of lies deep already. Not Natasha, who would have found the money somehow, some way, and ruined herself doing it. Not Nolan, who would only have laughed, or worse, said nothing at all — the silence I'd learned to fear more than any cruelty.

I went home. I made dinner. I set the table for one, because that was all he ever wanted, and I folded the diagnosis into the bottom of my shoebox, beneath the letters, beneath the bracelets, where it could keep them company in the dark.