By year three, Jason had stopped pretending to be patient. He’d make jokes about my biological clock in front of our friends, painting himself as the long-suffering husband dealing with a defective wife. I became the problem he had to solve, the burden he carried.

Then one night, everything changed. I was in our bedroom, injecting myself with another round of fertility hormones, when Jason walked in. His face held a look I’d never seen before—not frustration or disappointment, but something closer to disgust.