Invisible String

9

It had been a month since we lost her. A month since the quietest ultrasound room I’d ever sat in. A month since I stopped sleeping through the night. Four years of trying… and we were right back at the beginning. But not really. Because now there was grief tangled into everything.

I kept a calendar next to the bed. Not for ovulation or appointments anymore, just to remind me that time was still moving forward even when it felt like I wasn’t.

Travis never missed a day of sitting with me after I marked it off.

Some mornings were better. We’d laugh over breakfast—real laughter, not the forced kind. He’d put whipped cream on my coffee and draw dumb little hearts in it with a spoon. Other days I wouldn’t talk until noon, and he’d still be there, making sure I ate at least half a piece of toast before curling back up under the blankets.

We started going for walks. At first it was just to get out of the house, but eventually we walked longer and slower, and sometimes we’d end up in these deep conversations about what we thought life would look like if we just… stopped trying. What if it was just us?

I hated those talks. But I also needed them.

Because trying had started to feel like bruising.

Still, neither of us said the words out loud: “We’re done.” We weren’t there yet.

Tree kept sending emails. We finished more of the adoption paperwork. There were so many forms about who we were—our values, our home, our parenting styles, even our family medical history. I joked that the process was more invasive than pregnancy. But the truth was, it gave me something to do. A sense of hope I could hold in my hands, even if just on paper.

We cleaned out the nursery. Travis did most of it while I sat in the doorway, watching him fold away the little onesie we’d bought too early. He didn’t say much, but I saw his hands trembling when he took the mobile down from the crib. I stood up, walked across the room, and held him from behind while he cried.

Kylie came over once a week and never asked questions. She just showed up, sometimes with groceries, sometimes with dumb movies, and once with a kitten she found outside and named “Pepper” because “we all need something small and feisty right now.”

Jason kept texting Travis memes, and I knew it was his way of checking in. His girls drew me pictures of “Aunt Tay’s baby angel” and taped them to our fridge.

We still hadn’t told the world. That part scared me the most. I knew people would ask. They always ask. But the idea of putting something so sacred, so painful, into a caption made me feel hollow. Maybe one day, but not yet.

The thing is… we weren’t healed. I don’t even know what that would look like. But we were surviving. With quiet kindness. With cups of tea and long drives and playlists we didn’t skip through. With whispered prayers when we went to sleep and soft kisses in the morning.

And that was something.

Because after four years of trying to become parents, we finally understood—love isn’t just in the arrival of a child. It's in the trying, the hoping, the breaking, and the choosing each other again after the storm.

And we were still choosing each other.

Every single day.

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Then one day… we got a call.

I was in the kitchen, barefoot, hair still wet from the shower, stirring a pot of soup I didn’t even feel like eating. Travis was somewhere outside, probably in the garage organizing things he’d never admit didn’t need organizing. My phone buzzed, but I ignored it at first. I assumed it was another check-in or a reminder from Tree about more paperwork. Then it buzzed again.