“No.”
“From a doctor?”
“Luke always took me.”
The doctor slowly closed the folder.
“Did you ever see the actual test results?”
“No.”
She exchanged a glance with the nurse.
Then she opened another file.
“These records were transferred from three different clinics.”
My heart began pounding.
“What records?”
“Pregnancy-related visits.”
I stared at her.
“There are multiple.”
My mouth went dry.
“How many?”
The doctor hesitated.
“Five documented pregnancies.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“No.”
She turned the papers toward me.
The dates were listed one after another.
I recognized them.
Every one.
The months when I had suddenly become sick.
The nights Luke had insisted I had suffered another miscarriage.
The mornings when he told me not to ask questions.
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.”
Two days later, I was bleeding.
