“Is your partner on the way?”Clara had been asked some version of this question eleven times in the past nine months. By nurses, by the obstetrician’s receptionist, by the woman at the birthing class Clara had attended alone and left twenty minutes early because sitting in a circle of couples who kept reaching for each other’s hands had been more than she could manage that particular week. She had developed a response that was smooth and automatic and cost her almost nothing to deliver.

“He’s coming,” she said, smiling back. “He just got held up.”It was a lie so thoroughly practiced it no longer registered as one.

Emilio Salazar had left seven months ago, on the same night Clara had sat across from him at the kitchen table of their apartment in Austin and told him, with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she could not actually drink, that she was pregnant. He had not yelled. He had not thrown anything or slammed doors or made any of the dramatic exits that at least announce themselves clearly and give you something concrete to be angry about. He had simply gone to the bedroom, returned a few minutes later with a backpack, told her he needed some time to think, and walked out with the quiet, clean efficiency of a man who had been deciding this for considerably longer than the conversation had lasted. The door had closed behind him with almost no sound at all, barely a click, politely almost, and that near-silence was somehow the worst part of everything that followed.She had cried for three weeks.

Then she had stopped, not because grief had finished with her, but because grief had run directly into the practical reality of what came next, and practical reality does not wait for grief to resolve. She found a smaller apartment two miles east, negotiated the security deposit down by fifty dollars because she had asked and asking cost nothing. She picked up extra shifts at the diner where she had been working part-time, then more shifts, then doubles, until her feet swelled at the end of every night and she sat on the edge of her bed and rubbed them herself, talking quietly to the child growing inside her who could not yet hear her voice but who, the books all promised, would be able to soon.