We walked down the hallway to her office. She closed the door. This woman who had watched me go through three years of treatments without once flinching, this calm and steady physician, sat down across from me with her hands shaking.

“I could lose my license for what I am about to show you,” she said. “But you are my patient too, and you need to know this. Your husband’s name is Garrett Mercer. His phone number is the one listed on your file. He is your emergency contact.”

I nodded.“He is listed as emergency contact on another patient’s file as well.”I did not move.“A woman named Tanya Burch,” she said. “She is thirty-one years old. She is six months pregnant. He brings her to every appointment.”

I think something in my body stopped making sound at that point, because I remember opening my mouth but not feeling anything come out.

Dr. Petrova turned her monitor toward me. The patient check-in system logged a photo from the front desk camera, the kind taken automatically when a patient signs in. There was Garrett in the waiting room chair I had sat in less than an hour earlier. His arm was around a dark-haired woman with a visible pregnancy. He was smiling. The same smile he had given me when I showed him those four positive tests.

“He is scheduled to pick you up in twenty minutes,” Dr. Petrova said. “I think you should leave now.”

I grabbed my purse and walked to my car. Sat in the parking lot with my hands on the steering wheel and the engine off and stared at a Honda Odyssey in front of me with a bumper sticker that said BLESSED. I did not feel blessed. I could not have told you what I felt. I drove home without fully registering the drive, which is a frightening sentence to write, and pulled into the driveway and sat while the engine cooled and the neighbor’s sprinkler clicked back and forth across someone else’s lawn.