My husband kept visiting our surrogate alone, saying he just wanted to “check on the baby.” But when I hid a voice recorder in his jacket and heard what he was telling her behind my back, my heart stopped. He wasn’t just lying to me; he was planning something devastating.I can’t have children.When we first started trying, my husband, Ethan, held me through every negative pregnancy test. He would pull me close, press his lips to my forehead, and say, “We’ll try again,” like it was the most natural thing in the world.But after the fourth failed treatment, something shifted.We stopped talking about baby names. The nursery we’d spent a whole Sunday afternoon planning just became the storage room again.

The subject of children became something we just didn’t touch anymore.I started noticing the way Ethan looked at families in restaurants. He’d stare, just for a moment, and the second he caught me watching, he’d quickly look away. He never said anything. Neither did I.That was the problem, really.We both worked from home, and sometimes it felt like we were spending our days dancing around each other.We orbited each other politely, carefully.One evening, after another doctor’s appointment, I sat on the edge of our bed and said it out loud.”Maybe we should stop trying.”Ethan stood by the window with his back to me. “I don’t want to give up on having a child.”A few weeks later, he came home with a thick stack of documents tucked under his arm and an excited look on his face. “I’ve been researching surrogacy.”

I stared at the papers, then looked at him. At that moment, I thought maybe we were going to be okay.