“They just turned five, didn’t they?” the morning show host asked warmly.
“Five years and two months,” Elena replied with a soft smile.
Alex calculated the dates instantly. They had separated five years and eleven months earlier.
Years before, Alex and Elena had endured nearly three difficult years trying to have a family. What had started with excitement and hope slowly became a cycle of specialist appointments, blood tests, and suffocating silence. Eventually, a fertility doctor explained that some of Elena’s reproductive numbers were poor, although he had never said the word impossible.
But Alex heard what he was most afraid of.
His mother, Beatrice Vance, took care of the rest. At every Sunday dinner in Beacon Hill, Beatrice questioned them about grandchildren, made passive-aggressive comments about Elena’s age, and wore an icy smile that wounded more than any direct insult. Alex, consumed by the need to preserve his family name and legacy, gradually began seeing his marriage not as a partnership, but as an obstacle standing between him and fatherhood.
