We did four rounds of IVF, it didn't work, and when the last call came I felt relief.

I have told exactly nobody that sentence and I've been carrying it for a year and a half.

Four rounds. Two miscarriages in there. Six years total from the first conversation to the last. Something like ninety thousand dollars, most of which was a second mortgage. Shots in the stomach in an office bathroom. A notebook I kept with temperatures in it for three years.

I wanted it. I want to be very clear that I wanted it. I was not faking six years.

But somewhere in year five something in me went quiet, and by the last round I was doing it because stopping felt like a verdict on everything that came before. I was finishing a project.

When the clinic called in April of last year and said what they said, my husband sat down on the floor of our hallway. And I was standing there feeling my shoulders come down for the first time in years, and then immediately hating myself for it.

He grieved for about eight months. He's mostly okay now. He says things like "maybe it wasn't meant to be," and I nod.

He thinks we lost the same thing. We didn't. He lost a child. I lost a project that was eating me, and I have never once been able to say that to the person who was in the room for all of it.

We have a good marriage. That's what makes this so heavy — I'm not hiding this from a stranger.

Is there anyone who felt relief at the end of something they were supposed to be devastated by? Did you ever tell the other person.