Miscarriage. It sounded like someone saying you dropped a glass. They named things to make them less terrifying, but I knew exactly what it meant. I had just lost my baby. A baby I hadn’t told anyone about, not even Wyatt. I had only suspected it last week, that faint double line on the test, and I had planned to tell him tonight. Now there was nothing left to tell. “We contacted your emergency contact,” the doctor continued. “Your husband, Wyatt. He should be here.”
Wyatt should have been here. My husband of three years, the man who held my hand under the altar and said he would love me in sickness and in health. He should have been running in holding a last-minute bouquet from the gift shop downstairs, breathless, asking if I was okay. But this is a story about should, a word even less reliable than the office water cooler. And the only thing that showed up wasn’t Wyatt. It was an Instagram tag announcing that their lives were still wonderful without me.
The first night, not a single soul, no Wyatt bursting through the door with red, swollen eyes, no frantic call asking, “Are you okay?” Just the steady beeping of the heart monitor, the soft shuffle of nurse’s shoes in the hallway, and me lying there with a stomach that had just become completely empty. I needed something. Yeah, I needed it badly. I needed my husband to care, even just once, that his wife had just lost their baby.
I stared at my phone like an addict, begging it to light up. A text, a call, hell, even a carrier pigeon would have done. The screen stayed pitch black. By the second day, still no Wyatt. Not a glimpse, not a sign that he remembered he had a wife. Instead, there was this feeling like someone had drawn a clean, straight line through my marriage. Not sharp pain, just a slow, burning sting. I started seeing the cracks I had been deliberately ignoring.
That silence of his. Turns out it wasn’t because he was busy. It was because I wasn’t in his priority list anymore. Then the anger shifted into something even scarier. Emptiness, like someone scooped out everything inside me and stuffed it with lifeless cotton. I had no excuse left to defend Wyatt. No more telling myself, “Maybe he’s tired. Maybe he’s busy. Maybe he doesn’t know yet.” Honestly, doing that was more exhausting than the cramping after the miscarriage when the person who was supposed to love you unconditionally starts acting like a stranger.
By the end of day two, I stopped checking my phone every few minutes. Stopped imagining Wyatt running in, grabbing my hand, saying he was sorry. Stopped expecting any shred of kindness from his family. The same family that only remembered me when they needed an urgent loan or needed me to put my name on their insurance.
I was clearerheaded, and that clarity stunned me. Apparently, even Hope gets tired and leaves. On day three, while I was lying there counting the ceiling tiles so I wouldn’t lose my mind, 247 of them, if you’re curious, my phone pinged. For a fraction of a second, my stupid heart jumped as if it still believed Wyatt had finally remembered I was lying here. Maybe he got into an accident. Maybe his phone broke. Maybe, I don’t know, he was trapped under something heavy and had just crawled out alive.
