Chapter 10: Due Date Approaching
Two weeks before my due date, the legal noise flattened into a waiting pattern.
Support amounts, once ordered, began as numbers on a schedule rather than negotiations at a deadbolt. Ethan’s compliance would be tested by time; my safety did not depend on his character improving. Priya reduced our call frequency to check-ins. The agency scheduled my leave. The hospital tour showed me elevators and recovery rooms. I memorized exits without apology.
Margaret went silent in the way of people who had lost an audience. I did not hunt for her silence’s meaning. I bought diapers in bulk and labeled drawers.
Ethan requested to be notified at labor. I agreed to a single notification through counsel after the baby was safe and I had requested it—not a open door to the delivery room for a man who had treated my pregnancy as leverage. Some privileges were earned by conduct. His conduct had earned him distance.
On a late night on the sofa, contractions still only practice, I wrote a letter to the baby and sealed it for a year I would open when both of us could stand more truth. It said, in short, that money had been demanded from my body and my accounts, and that I had chosen the body first. It said the door opened because I opened it. It said welcome.
Outside, the city moved through ordinary crime and ordinary kindness.
Inside, the woman they had called an abandoned single mother in advance of any abandonment finished the last client email of the week, set her hands on her stomach, and waited—
not for a wedding,
May you like
not for a PIN request,
but for a child who would arrive into a house where the locks answered only to us.
