The day Claude Delgado stood me up for the ninety-ninth time, I went to the class reunion alone. Again.

"Marlene Pruitt, how come you never bring our campus heartthrob to these things?"

"What's the deal? Still hiding him away like you did back in college, scared someone might steal him?"

At the reunion, plenty of people asked about him.

I forced a smile that didn't reach my eyes. "His company's been swamped. It's crunch time. He couldn't get away."

A chorus of sympathetic murmurs rippled across the table. Some bought it, some didn't.

Honestly, neither did I.

My friend sitting next to me leaned in close and lowered his voice. "Marley, are you and Claude still not planning on having kids?"

"I mean, you've been married five, six years now..."

I didn't understand. I frowned and cut him off. "What do you mean?"

"Claude came to our hospital last week for a vasectomy. You didn't know about this?"

——

"A vasec...tomy?"

The two words scraped through my throat like grains of sand, dry and raw and agonizing.

Brendan Matthews took one look at my face and realized he'd said something he shouldn't have.

He scrambled to backtrack. "Maybe I was wrong. I was pretty far away that day. Could've been someone else..."

But I couldn't hear a single word anymore.

My nails dug into my palms. I stared blankly at the wine glass in front of me. "What day?"

"What?"

"I said what day did you see Claude at the hospital."

Brendan knew no amount of explaining would help now. He pulled out his phone and checked his shift schedule. "Last Sunday at two. I was just switching shifts."

"He came alone."

It matched.

Last Sunday was our wedding anniversary. That evening around nine-thirty, I'd called him.

He said he was on a business trip and probably wouldn't be back until Wednesday.

So the "business trip" was a vasectomy he'd hidden from me, and Wednesday was his discharge date.

A bitter ache flooded through me, twisting my heart until it hurt to breathe.

Claude and I had been together for ten years. A decade of dating, six years of marriage. For all six of those years, we'd been trying to conceive.

He used to cup my face in his hands and say, "Marley, I want a baby that looks just like you so badly."

"But why can't we ever get pregnant?"

Over those six years, we'd been to every hospital, run every test. Neither of us had any issues.

And still, no baby.

To keep Claude from feeling pressured, I always told him we should let nature take its course. But deep down, I wanted a child more than anything.

I racked my brain and still couldn't fathom it. Why would Claude get a vasectomy?

The rest of that dinner tasted like cardboard. My stomach churned the entire time.

Halfway through, I made an excuse about something urgent at home and rushed out.

The moment I got back, I tore the apartment apart looking for any trace of a hospital visit.

I finally found it in the study's wastebasket: a hospital admission form dated last Friday, listing post-vasectomy care instructions.

I sat in the living room, staring at the crumpled slip of paper on the table.

The urge to call Claude and demand answers reached a boiling point.

The number you have dialed is temporarily unavailable...

Every single call. Rejected.

My mind drifted back to that afternoon, when Claude had bailed on me at the last minute.

"Marley, I have to go out with Ms. Vance tonight to discuss a contract. Just go to the reunion by yourself."

When Claude had come to the design department to tell me that, my mood had already hit rock bottom.

I couldn't even count how many times he'd done this. Canceled on me at the last second, always with the same excuses: overtime, contract negotiations, client dinners.

Claude had gone from being genuinely apologetic in the beginning to treating it like it was simply expected. And I had gone from accepting it willingly to dreading every time my phone buzzed with his name.

We always used to blow up at each other over things like this.

But this time, I said nothing.

"Got it."

Claude glanced at me with a flicker of surprise, but it wasn't long before his phone rang.

It was Rita Vance, rushing him.

He threw on a jacket and bolted out the door without so much as a goodbye.

It was always like this. The second Rita called, he'd drop every plan he'd ever made with me.

He'd left me alone in a hospital bed with a hundred-and-four-degree fever and didn't show his face for an entire week.

Even in bed, he'd shove me aside to answer her calls, pull his pants on, and say he had to go "meet a client."

And whenever I got upset, it was always the same line: It's for work. You're being petty. You're jealous. You're making a big deal out of nothing.

I tossed my phone onto the couch and walked out to the balcony for some air.

The breeze brushed my cheeks, but it did nothing to quiet the storm inside me.

Sitting in my inbox was an offer from a company overseas. My supervisor had put in a referral for me.

I'd been on the fence about accepting it. Now, it seemed like the only option left.

"I'll take the offer. I'll come in tomorrow to handle my resignation."

"I fully support this! Marlene, with your talent, you were always too good for this place."

My supervisor replied almost instantly. I stared at the words on the screen, feeling strangely hollow.

Click. The front door opened.

"The reunion's over already?"

Claude strolled in humming a tune, the faint smell of alcohol trailing behind him.

He walked toward me with a grin, but the moment his eyes landed on the hospital admission slip on the table, his expression froze.

"Claude, don't you think you owe me an explanation?"

His footsteps halted at the entrance to the living room. His gaze drifted to the slip on the coffee table.

"You went through my things?"

That was the first thing out of his mouth. Not an explanation. Not an apology.

An accusation, dripping with indignation.

His cold stare seeped into me, freezing me from the inside out. I drew a deep breath and forced myself to stay calm.

"Yeah. I went through your things."

"And if I hadn't, I never would have known you went behind my back to get a vasectomy."

Even as I spoke, I could hear the tremor in my own voice.

I swallowed the hurt and the rage, holding myself together by sheer willpower as I faced him.

"I'm busy with work. I'm at a critical point in my career. I don't want kids right now."

Claude's voice was level. Flat. Not a trace of emotion.

Meanwhile, I was the one falling apart like a lunatic.

"Something this big, and you didn't think you needed to discuss it with me?"

I jabbed my finger at the slip. "Claude, if pregnancy and childbirth are my career risk to bear, then what was the point of getting a vasectomy behind my back? What was it really for?"

My voice climbed higher with every word, sharp with fury. All it earned me was the stone wall of his expression.

He snatched the slip off the table with a look of pure irritation. "Marlene, having a baby isn't something you women get to decide on your own."

"If I want one, I'll have one. If I don't, nobody's forcing me."

The words landed, and then, right in front of me, he tore the slip to shreds.

Scraps of paper drifted to the floor. I sat there as if standing on a sheet of ice, trembling from head to toe.

My eyes burned. I turned my head away, the pain too much to look at him.

"Claude, I want a divorce."

The vast living room sank into silence.

The thought had crossed my mind more times than I could count.

But saying it out loud? That was the first time.

"Over this? You're asking for a divorce over this?"

"Marlene, are things really so bad that you have to blow everything up? Don't you think I've been working hard for this family too?"

"For this family?"

I cut him off, stood up, and looked down at him.

"Claude Delgado, do you dare say you were really doing this for our family?!"

"If you were doing it for our family, would you have abandoned me over and over again?"

Claude stared at me in disbelief, his mouth hanging open, unable to form a single word.

Claude and I had been classmates in college. He was handsome, top of his class, charming, talented — the center of everyone's attention.

That he chose me out of all the girls vying for him was something I never expected.

Everyone said I'd hit the jackpot, that I was the luckiest girl alive to have caught Claude Delgado's eye.

Even I believed that.

I'd asked him more than once why he picked me. He always smiled and said, "Because you're good."

"I can tell — you genuinely care about me."

For four years, I gave Claude everything he asked for and never dared ask for too much in return.

When we got married, his family's demands were steep, but my parents and I did our best to meet every one of them.

Marrying him was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to me.

But everything changed three years ago, when Claude got laid off.

"Marlene, what if I came to work at your company?"

"We could commute together, and then we could really focus on trying for a baby."

To get Claude a position, I spent weeks drinking with my supervisor after hours, pushing myself until I nearly ended up hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer.

I finally secured him a spot — team lead in the sales department.

"Most of the client work is handled by Ms. Vance herself, so you won't be too busy. It's a pretty easy gig."

At first, Claude really wasn't busy.

We exercised together to prepare for conception, drank herbal supplements together to get our bodies in shape.

But it wasn't long before I discovered the drinking.

One night, he stumbled through the door reeking of alcohol. Again.

"Claude, no smoking and no drinking while we're trying to conceive — weren't those your rules?"

I swallowed my frustration and tried to talk to him calmly.

"When Ms. Vance pours you a drink, you don't say no."

"Marlene, stop making something out of nothing. I never said I didn't want a kid."

His cold indifference cut through me.

Sure enough, a few days later his test results came back: critically low sperm motility.

Starting from the year before last, Claude was out with Rita every single day.

They never bothered to keep up appearances in front of anyone. Everything that happened at those dinner tables made its way through the office word for word.

"Marlene, your husband..."

Even my supervisor had hinted at it more than once. But I chose to believe Claude.

Ten years together. I refused to believe he would do something like that to me.

So I kept making excuses for him, covering for him.

But the more it happened, the colder my heart grew.

"Marley, this one's on me."

"I had no idea Claude was trying for a baby. If I'd known, I never would have let him sit at the table."

To show her remorse, Rita handed Claude a check for ten thousand dollars on the spot.

I pressed my lips together and said nothing.

"Marley, I'm sorry."

"I really didn't know it would turn out like this."

I looked up at him, perfectly calm. "Claude, can you please stop drinking?"

Claude pulled me into his arms. "Marlene, I'll be more careful from now on."

He said I'll be more careful. Not I'll stop.

Looking back, that was when I should have known. Claude had already started crossing lines in his mind.

After that, the subject of children became something neither of us dared to touch.

"Marlene, you think I don't want kids?"

"If I didn't want them, why would I have gone through IVF with you?!"

That actually made me laugh.

"Claude, name one time you showed up."