It wasn’t Cristina who announced her pregnancy; it was her ginger ale. An unassuming, detonated bomb resting on the table between us, exactly where a glass of Sancerre should have been.

It was at that dinner that I knew, my heart tender and bruised after our third round of IVF, my body reeling from a miscarriage just days earlier, but weeks would pass before she’d say it aloud. After living so many stages of our lives alongside each other—college suitemates, magazine colleagues, the free-for-all that is being 20-something single women in New York City—Cristina’s path and mine had reached the sharpest of forks. Our divergence, though, was made in silence.

And so began a new phase in our relationship, a complicated dance that shifted between revealing and withholding, between just tell me

See Full Page