Bitter Orange

She swallowed the prenatal vitamin with hotel tap water, the pill scraping her throat like a secret she'd meant to confess hours ago. Outside, the pool shimmered turquoise beneath an Arizona sunset the color of a bruise turning orange — that impossible transition between damage and healing.

Marcus sat on the edge of the lounge chair, his back to her. In three years of marriage, she'd never seen his spine look so brittle. "You could have told me," he said, not turning around. "Before you booked the flight."

"Would it have changed anything?" The words came out flat. She'd practiced them in the mirror of their bathroom, beside his toothbrush and the vitamins he'd started taking last winter, when they'd first started trying.

He turned then, and she saw it: that particular look men get when they realize the woman they love has been carrying a weight they never noticed. "I don't know, El. Maybe not. But you didn't even give me the chance to help you bear it."

The word bear caught in her throat. She'd borne it alone for eight weeks — the morning sickness, the bleeding, the ultrasound technician's apologetic silence, the follow-up appointment where they'd used words like spontaneous abortion and chromosomal abnormality. She'd borne it while he'd been at work, while he'd planned their anniversary trip to Sedona, while he'd slept beside her unaware.

"I'm not sure I can have babies," she said finally, and the pool water rippled in the wind, distorting the reflection. "Not anymore. Maybe not ever."

Marcus stood up slowly. His shadow stretched across the concrete between them, long and dark and somehow comforting. He didn't say the right things — didn't promise it would be fine, didn't tell her it didn't matter, didn't make her grief smaller. He just walked to her chair and folded himself onto it, pulling her into the kind of embrace that acknowledges something has broken.

"We'll bear it," he said into her hair. "Whatever comes next."

She watched the last of the orange light fade from the sky, swallowed another vitamin just to have something to do with her hands, and let herself believe him.