Romeo And Juliet Alternate Ending

Angelica sighed as she placed Juliet’s birthday dress back on the rack.
How does she answer such a question? It was so unexpected; it left her fumbling for answers.
‘Nurse, have you by any chance wanted a family?’
Angelica sat down on her bed. She guarded herself so carefully, but now she was raw and exposed. The gates were open. The tears wouldn’t stop. She cried so hard her chest burned. All those years of confusion, loneliness, guilt, regret and love teased a memory from her jumbled mind.
* * * * *
Maybe she was the one broken.
Was that even how it worked? Who knew…?
Angelica put the thought away and exited the bathroom to return to work. A maid’s workday was a very pressing matter and she didn’t have time to contemplate frivolous things like infertility. She sat down at the table and listened to Josephine, who was filling her in on the latest news about Lady Capulet expecting a baby, but the niggling thought wouldn’t go away. Was it her fault? She side eyed Josephine. Another maid, her friend, was among the first of her contemporaries to have children, which was all too entertaining considering Josephine spent most of her life trying to shirk responsibility, and now it seemed like everyone had at least one baby, soon even the Capulets themselves.

She and her husband, Ernest, had none.

It wasn’t for lack of opportunity or trying. They had been together for years and married for most of them, and between his position at the Castle with the Prince and her working for the Capulets, they were well-established and ready. It was time to have a baby. So why was it so

difficult?
Ernest… something about his body the doctor confirmed. Angelica didn’t fully grasp it all. She just wished it was her problem, not his. She didn’t like to see him disappointed and no matter what she tried to tell him, he couldn’t get over the notion that something was wrong with him.
Angelica didn’t know how to fix that.
“We’ll just have to keep trying,” she told him resolutely.
They were both generally emotional people and while it was arguably their best trait as a couple, their ability to feed off of each other’s joy and happiness, it was also their greatest flaw. As easily as they could build each other up, they could tear each other down and the moment they walked out the door after the doctor broke them the news she felt wide range of emotions inside of her: sadness, anger and despair. Ernest’s anguish was like a bucket of cold water on her tenacity. She felt numb.
She had known the fact that they had just been told they had roughly the same chance of conceiving as Capulets and Montague had to coming to peace which wouldn’t be a pleasant one to bring home, but she still wasn’t too concerned. Angelica had never cared much for statistics, and it wasn’t necessarily impossible. It was just that the stars and planets probably needed to align first.