Six months to live

I have half a year left to live.

The doctor said it softly, the way you speak to a child who is about to drop something fragile. I nodded, because nodding was easier than breathing.

Six months. I waited for the tears, the panic, anything. But all I felt was a strange, hollow quiet, as if some part of me had been expecting this for years.

I walked out of the hospital holding a folder of scans I couldn't bring myself to read. My phone buzzed in my bag. A gossip account I didn't even follow had sent me a photo.

Lucian Hart, escorting a woman into a private maternity clinic.

The picture was blurry, but I would know that profile anywhere. My husband's hand rested at the small of her back, careful and protective, the way he had never once touched me. The woman was Serena Vale. Even in a bad photo, she glowed.

I stood in the parking lot and laughed. It wasn't a happy sound. A man walking past gave me a strange look, and I didn't blame him.

On the very day I learned I was dying, my husband was at a prenatal check up with another woman.

Let me tell you how I got here.

I married Lucian at twenty four. I believed the coldness in him was armor, and that if I loved him patiently enough, it would crack. My mother in law, Madam Hart, looked me over at our wedding banquet like a maid who had wandered into the wrong room.

"A girl with no family and no name," she told the guests, loud enough for me to hear. "At least she is quiet."

Lucian was standing right beside me. He said nothing. That was the first time, but it was not the last.

Eight years of it. Eight years of dinners where Madam Hart cut me down between courses. "Look at her hands, so rough for a Hart wife." "One daughter, and then nothing. What use is she?" "Did the orphan forget to order the good tea again?"

Every time, Lucian would say one word. "Mother." Flat, tired, never looking up from his phone. That single word was the full extent of his defense, and it never stopped her once.

I told myself it was enough. That he was trying, in his own way.

Then there was Mia.

My Mia used to fall asleep only on my shoulder. She used to run down the hall when she heard my footsteps, arms wide, shouting Mama. I remember thinking my heart would never be that full again.

She was right about that, though not in the way I meant.

Somewhere around her sixth birthday, Madam Hart started taking her to the tea house every Sunday. She came back with new manners and new words. By seven she had stopped running to me. By eight she flinched when I hugged her.

"Serena Yi smells nicer than you," she told me last spring, without any cruelty, the way a child states a fact. "And she doesn't cry all the time."

I hadn't known I was crying until she said it.

Serena Yi. That was what my daughter called her. Aunt Serena. The woman who brought her ribbons and imported chocolate, who laughed easily and knew which fork to use without thinking. The woman Lucian had loved before me, and whom his mother had never stopped mourning as a daughter in law.

I had known all of this. I had chosen to live inside it anyway.

I drove home that evening with the folder on the passenger seat, rehearsing.

Lucian, I need to tell you something. I went to the hospital today. The doctor says I have six months.

Simple. Four sentences. Even he couldn't misread it.

The house was warmly lit when I pulled in. I could hear laughter from the front hall, and my chest tightened, because it was Mia's laugh. The real one. The one I hadn't heard aimed at me in years.

I stepped into the living room and stopped.

Lucian sat on the sofa with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. Serena was beside him, one hand resting on her stomach. And curled into her lap like a kitten was my daughter, holding a pink ribbon and giggling at something Serena had whispered.

The three of them looked like a family. I stood in the doorway holding my own house keys, and I looked like the delivery woman.

Mia saw me first. The light went out of her face like someone had flicked a switch.

"Oh," she said. "You're back."

Lucian looked up. There was no guilt in his eyes, no surprise. Only mild irritation, the look you give a clock that chimed at the wrong moment.

"You're late," he said.

"Lucian." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "I need to talk to you. It's important."

"Later."

"It's about my health. I went to the hospital today and the doctor said..."

"Sera." He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I've had a long day. Whatever it is, you're probably tired. Get some rest."

Tired.

The doctor had shown me my scan. There was a shadow on it the size of a walnut, and my husband thought I was tired.

Serena lowered her eyes, and a small, polite smile touched her lips. It wasn't kind. It was the smile of someone who already knew the ending of a story I was still reading.

"Mama's always dramatic," Mia muttered into Serena's shoulder.

Something inside me, something that had held for eight years, gave a soft, terrible crack.

I set the folder on the side table. I didn't cry. I only said, quietly, "I have six months, Lucian. That's all I wanted to tell you."

For the first time all evening, he looked at me properly. I saw a flicker of something cross his face, and for one wild second I thought, he heard me. He finally heard me.

Then his jaw tightened, and he glanced toward the dining room.

"We'll discuss that later," he said. "There's something more urgent. My mother wants us to hire a surrogate. She says it's time this family had a son."

The room tilted.

"A surrogate," I repeated.

"You can't give us one, Sera. We both know that." He said it plainly, like reading a weather report. "Mother has waited long enough. And I've already chosen who will carry the child."

He didn't look at Serena. He didn't need to.

She rose gracefully from the sofa, one hand still resting on her stomach, and for the first time that night she met my eyes without pretending to be sorry.

"Sera," she said gently. "You should sit down. There's one more thing we haven't told you."

Behind her, from the dining room, Madam Hart's voice rang out, bright with a joy I had never once heard aimed at me.

"Tell her, Lucian. Tell her the baby is already three months along.”