When Caleb and I met, we were broke students sharing a table in the library, his restless energy a foil to my quiet focus. He was the drumroll; I was the pause that followed. Together we found balance. We fell in love. Our wedding was a courthouse formality, one his mother, Vivien Monroe, dismissed with cold disdain. “A proper marriage,” she’d remarked, “requires proper planning.”
Her disapproval buzzed constantly—never shouted, always woven into sly jabs. She seems unstable, Caleb. Isn’t dependability crucial?
Still, we pushed on. We built a life. When we tried for a child, it felt like a rebirth. But the journey broke me—two miscarriages, then endometriosis. Every negative test was a wound. Vivien’s sympathy was absent. “Maybe it isn’t meant to be,” she told Caleb privately, never me.
