The Last Day We Tried

Sarah sat by the apartment complex pool at 2 AM, the third anniversary of their first appointment with the fertility specialist. Three years of needles, charts, temperature tracking, and hope that curved upward then shattered every month. She felt like a zombie moving through the architecture of her former life.

She checked her reflection in the darkened glass of the lobby doors. A piece of spinach from dinner—her attempt at preparing something "nourishing," as the specialist had suggested—lodged in her teeth.

She didn't care enough to remove it.

Jack found her there with two sweating cans of beer. The fluorescent pool lights cast his face in blue and gold, like a photograph underwater.

"You okay?"

"We're in a bear market," she said, not meeting his eyes. "Hope is down. Despair is up. That's what the charts say."

He sat beside her on the concrete edge, legs dangling into the water. The pool temperature had dropped hours ago.

"My brother called," Jack said. "Him and Lisa are due in February."

The words landed like stones.

"I don't know how to be happy for them anymore," Sarah said, her voice cracking. "I don't know how to be anything except this. This zombie person who used to be me."

She touched her wedding ring, spinning it around her finger.

"Maybe we stop trying," Jack said quietly. "Maybe we just... figure out who we are now. If there's still an us underneath all of this."

She looked at him—the gentleness in his face, the exhaustion they shared, the way he still held her hand even through everything.

"I loved you before we started trying," she said. "I don't know if I remember how."

"We can learn," he said.

They watched the water ripple in the wind, two survivors in the fluorescent dark, beginning again from somewhere closer to zero than they'd ever been.