I couldn’t bear another word.
I walked to the drawer by the front door—the one overflowing with unopened envelopes.
My hands were shaking so badly that half of them fell onto the floor.
Every single one was from the fertility clinic.
One.
Two.
Five.
Eight.
Every envelope was stamped with one word:
URGENT.
I tore open the oldest one.
It had been mailed eleven months earlier…
Just after we buried Regina.
Buried among lines of medical jargon I couldn’t understand were two words that I understood perfectly.
Last Embryo.
till in my hand. When I walked in, the door to my little Regi’s bedroom was standing wide open. The pink walls had been covered with plastic sheets, and in the middle of the room was a half-built crib that I had never bought.
A crib meant for a baby who couldn’t possibly exist.
Because my husband, Rodrigo, couldn’t have children.
He had sworn it to me.
We had gone to the fertility clinic together.
Every Wednesday, I visited the cemetery. I always brought Regina white daisies because they were the flowers she used to proudly pick from the neighbor’s garden, clutching them tightly in her tiny fist.
For an entire year, I slept with her stuffed animal pressed against my chest, just so I could still smell a trace of her.
A whole year.
Rodrigo kept telling me I wasn’t moving on.
“We have to look ahead, Diana.”
But to me, “looking ahead” simply meant learning how to breathe without her.
Nothing more.
Regina hadn’t come easily. It had taken years of treatments, countless doctors, and an incredibly expensive fertility clinic downtown before she finally came into our lives.
She was our miracle.
