Their new life was built on defiance. They lived in a small, rented apartment with white walls, second-hand furniture, and a view of a brick alley. It was the antithesis of their past, and they loved it.
They were a two-person corporation. By day, Eunice took on freelance consulting gigs, her old "A-list" clients quietly hiring her "off the books" because, scandal or no, she was still the best. Karlman, cut off from his original investors, poured his brilliance into a new, leaner algorithm, working from a laptop balanced on a stack of books.
By night, they were just Eunice and Karlman. They ate cheap takeout on the floor, sharing a bottle of wine. They made love with the desperate, affirming energy of survivors, a physical act of "we are still here." Their love, forged in the fire of their families' rejection, was harder and purer than anything they'd ever known.
They were happy.
But the "curse" was not a shadow. In those first years, it was just... a quiet room.
"We should paint the second bedroom," Eunice said one Saturday, three years in. They were finally financially stable enough to think about paint. "A light yellow. Or green."
"Yellow," Karlman agreed, not looking up from his screen. "Gender neutral."
The words hung in the air. Gender neutral. For a child that was not there. They were "A-types," planners. They were not not trying. They had simply... "tabled" the crisis of their medical diagnosis, focusing on the immediate crisis of survival. They were young. They had time.
But time kept moving.
At five years, they went to a rare dinner party, hosted by one of Karlman's new, young employees. The apartment was a mirror of their own, but it wasn't quiet. It was chaos. A high-chair was sticky-taped to the table. A plastic, primary-colored play-pen dominated the living room. The host, a man Karlman respected, had a smear of dried applesauce on his collar.
Eunice and Karlman sat on the sofa, wine glasses in hand, watching. They were immaculate. Their clothes were expensive. They were the picture of success. They looked at the chaos, the noise, the screaming, laughing child being bounced on a knee, and then they looked at each other.
They had never felt so out of place.
"God, the noise," Karlman said in the car on the way home, trying to make a joke.
"I know," Eunice said, her voice a little too bright. "And the smell."
They laughed. But it was a thin, brittle sound. When they got back to their own apartment, it was perfect. Clean. Silent. The second bedroom was still white. The quiet, for the first time, felt like a judgment.