Mark looked at the paper, and I watched his face go completely white.

“What is that?” I asked, looking between Martha and my husband.

“These are your husband’s semen analysis results from when you two first started seeing specialists,” Martha explained, her eyes locked onto Mark. “According to the certified laboratory report, Mark has a zero sperm count.

He is completely, permanently sterile due to a severe case of mumps he had as a pre-teen.”

I felt the air leave my lungs.

“What?” I whispered.

“He knew,” Martha said, her voice hardening. “He received these results 6 years ago. But instead of telling you, he intercepted the clinic mail, told you the doctors said the issue was on your end, and let you spend the last 6 years crying, blaming yourself, and taking dangerous hormone injections.”

I looked at Mark.

He was shaking. He couldn’t look at me. He was staring at the table like he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him whole.

“You knew?” I asked. My voice was barely a whisper, but it cut through the room like a knife. “You let me think I was broken? For 6 years?”

“Ellen, I… my pride… I couldn’t tell you,” he stammered, his voice cracking. “A man isn’t supposed to… I thought we could just keep trying, maybe a miracle…”

“A miracle?” I stood up, my chair scraping loudly against the linoleum. “You let me inject myself with hormones that made me sick. You let me believe my body was a failure. You watched me cry myself to sleep every month, Mark!”

But then, the second realization hit me.

It hit me so hard I almost laughed.

I looked at the document, then I pointed toward the glass door of the waiting room where Rachel was sitting.

“If you have a zero sperm count, Mark…” I started.

Mark’s eyes went wide. The realization hit him at the exact same second.

He turned around and looked through the glass window at Rachel, who was happily scrolling on her phone, completely unaware.

“No,” Mark whispered, his hands beginning to tremble violently. “No, she said… she said it was a miracle. She said it was mine.”

“Well, according to science, it isn’t,” Martha said, leaning back in her chair with a very dry, satisfied smile. “So, let’s talk about that house equity again, shall we?”

Mark didn’t even argue. He was so broken, so utterly destroyed by the sudden realization that his mistress had cheated on him too, that he signed over the entire house and his share of the savings just to make the court date go away.