“I’d rather die Richard. If I can’t have a baby I’d rather just be dead.” Mary’s words gouged a hole deep in his soul and a lifetime of possibilities ended there and then in the sterile white of the bathroom. He knew that her mental state had slipped, he had watched it slipping, held together only by the fragile glue that hope provides. The marital bed had become an instrument of torture; a place where she ground resentment into him and extracted hope from him. Yet he still wanted her, he still loved her. In his eyes she was still beautiful, though her eyes were so often empty and her heart was so often cold. He had sidestepped her irrational behaviour for as long as he could and would have stepped into an abyss had Mrs Popborski not appeared from nowhere and offered to provide the IVF treatment that no one else would.
Rebecca
