March in Chicago was the season that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.
Some mornings it arrived cold and sharp with the specific honesty of winter refusing to concede. Other mornings it came soft and almost warm — the particular tentative warmth of something that was trying and hadn’t yet committed. Aria had lived through Chicago March before and knew better than to trust it. But she sat at the kitchen table on a Wednesday morning in the middle of it and thought that this specific March — the one she was living through now — had a quality that none of the previous ones had possessed.
She was five months pregnant.
The specific physical fact of it had become, over the past two months, the most present thing in her daily experience. Not unpleasantly — she had expected discomfort and ha
