My husband had twins with my best friend. I signed the divorce papers without a word. Then he went to his mother’s house, and she went white and said, “She still hasn’t told you about that?”
And a note, in handwriting I have known for twelve years:
Before you say anything to him, you should know this. I’m sorry. B.
Bernadine Wray. His mother. Seventy-one.
Now — here is the part that everybody gets wrong when I tell this, and it is the part that matters.
I already knew he was sterile.
I have known since June of 2016.
We tried from 2013. Two and a half years of nothing. Then a clinic, and a full workup for both of us, and on the twenty-second of June, 2016, a consultant sat both of us down in a room in Thane City and told us that Corbin had non-obstructive azoospermia and that donor conception was the realistic route.
He cried in that room. I held his hand.
We used a donor. Both times. In 2017 and in 2019. That is not a secret and it never was; my sister knows, my two closest colleagues know, and if we had ever had a living child we would have told that child from the beginning, because that is what you do now and because it is not shameful.
