She was preparing to film the fifth season of her OWN drama
Queen Sugar — and she had just learned she was expecting her first child. "I was so filled with joy," she says in the new issue PEOPLE. "I was already planning. It affected every decision I made. We were even using a name."
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Then, as she approached the three-month mark, her doctor told her that he couldn't hear a heartbeat.
"My fiancé and I were devastated," she says. Though she leaned on her fiancé, a writer and physician who specializes in end of life care (whom she doesn't name for patient privacy), Gardner, 39, felt isolated in her grief, especially amid the pandemic.