His Second Wife | Three Kinds of Silence

5. Technically Possible

SANA – Three Months After

The doctor’s words still live inside my head like a piece of glass I can’t pull out.

“Technically possible.”

She had said it so casually, tapping the ultrasound screen with her pen while my mother-in-law, my own mother, and Rahim sat beside me. “The scarring is severe, but the lining might still hold. It’s a long shot… but some women get lucky.”

Lucky.

Three months after the accident, and that was all we had left — a long shot at luck.

That evening, the bedroom light was dim, only the bedside lamp casting a soft golden glow. Rahim moved above me like I was made of the same fragile glass he installed in his high-rise buildings. Careful. Almost reverent. His hands slid slowly over my hips, tracing curves he once knew by heart, as if any sudden pressure might make me shatter.

He kissed my scars first.

Every jagged line across my lower belly — the lightning under my skin — received slow, apologetic kisses. They felt less like desire and more like goodbye. Like he was mourning the body I used to have.

I closed my eyes and pretended.

I pretended I could still feel that tiny foot pressing against my ribs. I pretended the warmth spreading through me was hope instead of grief and medicine. For two weeks I had let myself believe. Two weeks of counting days like a desperate schoolgirl. Two weeks of pressing my palm to my stomach every time Rahim left for the site and whispering, “Stay this time. Please stay.”

He was so gentle it hurt.

Too gentle. The kind of gentle that used to make me feel cherished. Now it only reminded me how broken I was. His body was warm and familiar, but every thrust was measured, every breath controlled — as if he was terrified that real passion might tear open something else inside me. Still, I wrapped my legs around him and dug my nails into his shoulders, pulling him closer. I needed to feel something. Anything except this endless emptiness.

When he finished, he stayed inside me longer than usual, forehead pressed to mine, breathing hard.

“I love you,” he whispered against my lips, voice cracking the same way it did in the hospital. “We’re going to be okay, Sana.”

I nodded. Speaking would have shattered the lie we were both desperately trying to live inside.

For fourteen days, hope sat in my chest like a warm stone. I stopped drinking tea. I followed every pregnancy app religiously. I avoided arguments like they were landmines. Rahim started coming home earlier from the site. He brought jasmine oil from New Market without me asking. At night he still slept on the couch, but sometimes I would wake up to find him standing in the doorway, just watching me sleep — as if he was scared I might disappear too.

My mother called every day. “Beta, eat properly. Drink the milk with dates I sent. And pray Tahajjud. Allah will listen.”

Rahim’s Ammu visited twice. She brought special herbal medicines and sat beside me, holding my hand. “Don’t worry, Sana. Many women face this. You are young. You will conceive again, Inshallah. Just keep trying. The family is praying for you.”

Even our neighbours sent messages. Aunty from the second floor dropped off homemade kheer “for strength.”

Then the blood came.

Not the violent flood from the first loss. Just a small, stubborn pink stain when I wiped after using the toilet. I sat on the cold bathroom floor, salwar around my ankles, staring at it for what felt like hours. The tile was the same colour as the one in our old apartment. Funny how some things never change while your entire world collapses again.

I laughed once — a dry, ugly sound that scraped my throat raw. Not a scream. Not tears. Just one broken laugh because I didn’t even have the energy left to cry anymore.

I flushed the toilet, washed my hands twice, changed into a fresh pad, and walked back to the bedroom like it was any other day. I lay on my side, pulled the sheet up to my chin, and stared at the wall.

Rahim would be home in two hours. I would smile when he walked in. I would ask about the concrete pour at the site. I would pretend the warm stone of hope was still there instead of the familiar cold hollow that had moved back in.

The scars itched worse than usual tonight. I reached down and traced every ridge of lightning under my skin, reading them like braille. My body kept its own cruel record. It would never let me forget.

I closed my eyes and saw the car again — rain beating the windshield, my hand on my belly, Rahim’s laugh mixing with mine. The sudden headlights. The scream of metal. The terrible silence after.

When the front door finally clicked open, I heard his familiar footsteps in the hallway — heavy, tired, the rhythm I had memorized over seven years of marriage. He paused outside the bedroom door, the way he always did now. Like he needed permission to enter the room that used to belong to both of us.

“Sana?” His voice was soft. Careful.

I kept my eyes closed and breathed slowly, pretending to be asleep. I couldn’t look at him yet. Not while the blood was still warm between my legs. Not while the word “technically” kept ringing in my ears like a cruel joke.

He came in anyway. The mattress dipped as he sat on the edge. His hand hovered above my shoulder before settling lightly, his thumb brushing the fabric of my nightie. I felt the slight tremor in his fingers — the same tremor I remembered from the wreckage.

I wanted to turn around and scream that my body was a graveyard and he kept trying to plant flowers in the dirt. I wanted to tell him the hope had died again, and this time it took another piece of me with it.

Instead, I stayed still.

He sat there for a long time, hand on my shoulder, breathing in the jasmine oil and the faint metallic scent I knew he could smell but would never mention. Eventually, he lay down on the very edge of the bed — not touching me, not quite.

I opened my eyes in the dark and stared at the ceiling fan turning lazy circles above us.

Technically possible, the doctor had said.

Technically.

The word tasted like blood, rain, and cold tea.

I pressed my palm to my stomach one last time and felt nothing but the raised scars and the slow, steady beat of my own useless heart.

Tomorrow I would smile again. Tomorrow I would pretend again.

But tonight, the warm stone of hope had turned back into ash, and I was learning how to carry it without letting Rahim see the weight.