I woke up still thinking about it.
That was the thing. One woman, one careless sentence, and it had followed me home and sat up through the night and was there before I was fully awake, already dressed and settled in.
Is this your son.
Not malicious. That was what I kept coming back to. Miriam had not been cruel. Had not meant to wound. Had simply looked at two people across a room and done the arithmetic and said the result before filtering it. An automatic social processing, a light social blunder, swiftly corrected, already forgotten by everyone who had witnessed it.
Except me.
I made coffee.
Stood at the window.
Thought: I am forty years old. I was married for twelve years to a man who damaged me in specific and lasting ways. I lost pregnancies I still don't talk about to most p
