I didn’t start recording my husband because I was paranoid—I did it because something in my gut refused to stay quiet any longer, and by the time I pressed play that night, I already knew I was about to hear something that would change everything.
Arthur and I had spent years trying to have a child, and in the beginning, he had been patient, almost gentle in the way he handled each disappointment. After every failed attempt, he would pull me close, press his lips to my forehead, and whisper, “We’ll try again,” like time was something we had an endless supply of.
But after the fourth failure, something shifted between us.
We stopped talking about baby names. The room we had carefully prepared together slowly turned into storage, as if we both silently agreed to pretend it had never existed. Conversations became shorter, movements more cautious, and even though we were in the same house every day, it felt like we were learning how to avoid each other without making it obvious.
One night, sitting on the edge of the bed after another clinic visit, I finally said what we had both been thinking. “Maybe we should stop.”
Arthur stood by the window with his back to me and didn’t turn around when he answered. “I’m not giving up on having a child.”
A few weeks later, he came home with a stack of documents and a kind of excitement I hadn’t seen in a long time. “I’ve been looking into surrogacy,” he said, placing the papers in front of me like this was the solution that would fix everything we had lost.
And I wanted to believe him.
So I said yes.
From that moment on, Arthur took control of everything—the agency, the lawyers, the meetings—and when he finally introduced me to Celine, I felt relief more than anything else. She was warm, easy to talk to, already a mother herself, and for the first time in a long time, it felt like we were building something together again instead of watching it fall apart.
The procedure worked.
Celine was pregnant.
And for a while, so was our hope.
At the beginning, we visited her together. We brought vitamins, groceries, anything she might need, and I spent an unreasonable amount of time picking out things like maternity pillows because I wanted to feel involved, like I had a place in all of this.
But then Arthur started going alone.
At first, it sounded reasonable.
“She might be running low on supplements,” he would say casually, already grabbing his keys. “I’ll just stop by quickly.”
Then it became more frequent.
Middle of the day.
Late at night.
Weekends.
Whenever he felt like it.
One afternoon, I reached for my coat and said, “Wait, I’ll come with you.”
Arthur paused at the door, just for a second, before shaking his head. “You don’t need to.”
The way he said it didn’t sound like a suggestion.
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