Van looked directly into my new bride’s eyes
Elena snatched the paper from the table. As her eyes scanned the medical report, her grip tightened until the paper crinkled. Her face, usually a mask of porcelain perfection, began to crack.
“This is a fertility report,” Elena whispered, her voice laced with rising horror. “It’s dated three years ago.” She looked at me, her eyes flashing with a mix of confusion and burgeoning rage. “Minh… it says here that the subject has a zero percent chance of natural conception. Chronic infertility due to a childhood complication. It says… it says it’s irreversible.”
A gasp rippled through the audience. My parents, sitting in the front row, looked as if they had been struck by lightning. I wanted to speak, to lie, to craft one of those brilliant excuses that had carried me through college and into the corporate world, but my throat was scorched dry.
“He knew,” Van said, stepping closer to us. “He’s known since he was twenty. He hid the records. He married me because my family could pay his debts and launch his career, knowing full well he was selling me a dream he could never fulfill. And now, he’s doing the same to you, Elena. He’s not marrying you for love; he’s marrying you for the merger of your companies, and he’s willing to let you spend your best years wondering why you can’t conceive, just so he doesn’t have to admit he isn’t the ‘perfect man’ everyone thinks he is.”
