Signal Loss

The cable was out again.

Sarah stared at the blank television screen, the same one she'd been avoiding for weeks. Behind her, on the kitchen counter, her iPhone pinged with yet another notification from the fertility forum—a chorus of strangers discussing follicle counts and injection protocols.

"Mark!" she called, not really expecting an answer. He was in the bedroom, probably on his third conference call of the evening.

She opened the refrigerator and stared at the wilted spinach she'd bought three days ago, part of her new regimen. Everything was a regimen now. The vitamin supplements that lined her bathroom counter—D3, CoQ10, prenatal—stood like tiny soldiers in a war she wasn't sure they could win. She took them religiously, even though part of her wondered if she was just buying expensive hope.

When Mark finally emerged, his face was illuminated by his phone's glow. "Cable company says they can send someone Thursday," he muttered, not looking at her. "That's four days from now."

"Thursday," she repeated. "That would have been our first ultrasound."

The silence that followed was heavy with everything they didn't say. Four rounds of IVF, four losses. The way Mark had started staying late at the office, the way Sarah had started reading pregnancy forums at 3 AM until her eyes burned.

The cable repairman arrived the next day—young, efficient, painfully cheerful. "Loose connection in the wall," he announced after twenty minutes of tracing cables through their apartment. "Sometimes you just need to reconnect what's come loose."

Sarah wanted to laugh or cry. Instead she thanked him and retreated to the kitchen. She stood before the refrigerator again, staring at the spinach. It was pitiful, really, how this bag of greens had become symbolic of everything she was trying to control.

She thought about disconnecting the cable entirely—just cutting the cord, like people did. But then what would they do with all that quiet? All that space for thinking?

Her iPhone buzzed. Another message from the group: "Don't lose hope. My friend tried for seven years and now she has twins."

Sarah set the phone on the counter. She washed the spinach, feeling the water run over her hands, and started chopping. Mark would be home soon. They would eat dinner in front of the restored television, watching something that demanded nothing of them, and tomorrow they would get up and do it all again. The vitamins, the waiting, the careful not-quite-hope.

But tonight, she would cook. She would wash this spinach and feed herself and her husband, and maybe that was enough for now.

When Mark walked through the door, he didn't check his phone first. He stood in the kitchen doorway watching her, his tie loosened, his shoulders sagging.

"I'm sorry about earlier," he said. "About the ultrasound date. I didn't—it just slipped away from me."

"It slips away from both of us," she said, and it wasn't an accusation. "Dinner's ready."

He came and stood beside her, not touching, not quite not touching. Close enough that she could smell the day on him—coffee, office air, something that was simply him.

"Can we eat without the TV?" he asked.

Sarah looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time in weeks. "Yes," she said. "Yes, we can."

They ate at the small table they'd bought at IKEA eight years ago, when the most important thing they had to decide on was what color chairs to get. The spinach was wilted but savory, the silence between them neither comfortable nor unbearable, just present. Like time, like loss, like the quiet possibility that maybe they would survive this after all, cable connections and vitamin regimens and all.