A permanent, safe part of our home.
Meanwhile, Greg’s visits became even less reliable.
He still paid support and appeared often enough to convince outsiders that he was doing fine, but his actual presence became ghostly.
Around that same time, Khloe and Greg were actively trying to have a baby.
I knew because my mother constantly told me.
Of course she did.
At first, the subject came up casually.
Then it became the unavoidable center of every family conversation I accidentally got dragged into.
Khloe apparently had irregular cycles and had always harbored a deep fear that something might be wrong with her fertility.
My mother talked endlessly about Khloe’s doctor appointments, expensive fertility medication, crushing monthly disappointments, and how difficult it was for poor Khloe to see pregnancy announcements online.
I actually felt genuinely sorry for her.
I know that sounds insane after everything she did to me, but I did.
Infertility is a uniquely cruel, soul-crushing biological lottery.
I did not want Khloe to suffer just because she had made me suffer.
But I also fiercely did not want to become involved in her drama.
Both things could be true at the same time, even if my mother’s binary brain never understood that.
Greg, meanwhile, apparently told everyone the fertility problem had to be on Khloe’s side because, as he smugly pointed out, he already had a perfectly healthy biological child.
That became unquestioned proof inside their household.
He had fathered Leo.
Therefore, his fertility was supposedly beyond reproach.
I didn’t know enough about their private medical situation to challenge that logic.
And frankly, I didn’t want to know.
It wasn’t my circus anymore.
Years passed this way.
My marriage to Marcus settled into the kind of deep, comfortable rhythm I had once thought was too boring to be special.
We shared mundane grocery lists on our phones, folded mountains of laundry while complaining about our bosses, and playfully argued about whose turn it was to call the plumber when the sink backed up.
Leo grew older and taller.
Marcus naturally became the person Leo asked for help with complicated math homework and the person who took him outside to throw a football when he had too much pent-up energy.
Greg slowly faded into the background, becoming more like a recurring, easily canceled appointment on the calendar than a father.
Then I found out I was pregnant again.
I sat on the cold tile of my bathroom floor staring at two pink lines and cried hysterically.
It wasn’t sad crying.
It wasn’t exactly pure happy crying either.
It was a tidal wave of relief, primal fear, immense joy, and old suffocating panic.
Pregnancy had been the vulnerable backdrop to the worst betrayal of my life the first time around.
My body remembered that trauma even if my mind had moved forward.
Marcus found me on the bathroom floor.
He didn’t ask questions.
He folded his large frame down beside me even though there was barely room and one knee was practically jammed beneath the sink cabinet.
He wrapped his arms tightly around my shaking shoulders.
“We’re okay, Elena,” he whispered. “I’ve got you. This is different. I am not him.”
I wanted to believe him so badly that I actually became angry at myself for needing the reassurance.
We waited until I was safely through the first trimester.
Then we sat Leo down and told him.
He screamed at the top of his lungs, hugged me so hard he knocked the breath out of me, and immediately asked whether the new baby could sleep in his room in a bunk bed.